The Thin Line Between Modernity and Tradition in Queer Performance

Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.¹

Frottage captures the aesthetic (as a term of artistic practice) and the libidinal (as a term of sex practice), and so gestures to the creative ways that the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds.²

In recent years, trans people and trans politics have reached new heights of visibility in queer and sexual minority politics and culture. Not unlike many other sexual minority political concerns, most comparatively that of gay and lesbian politics, trans politics has been built around the idea of visibility and “coming out.” In fact, too often, common understandings of trans people position them as merely an extension of gay and lesbian people. While it is important to recognize that trans people have long been members of the gay and lesbian community, in recent years trans people have also asserted their differences from gay and lesbian people (I will discuss this further below). The assertion is important because it allows us to not merely see trans people as queer people, but it allows us to more fully come to terms with the ways in which trans people confound both gender and sex and, therefore, pushes us to consider the ways in which those social categories organize our lives and what might be possible once we uncouple gender from sexuality. 

In the context of visibility, non-binary and trans people in the beginning of the twenty-first century are far more visible than ever before. A couple of years ago, when Cher and Sonny Bono’s child Chastity Bono transitioned to Chaz Bono, the visibility of trans people reached heights not seen before. However, it is important to note that in the history of trans people, bursts of large-scale attention have continually characterized their presence as “others.” One might argue that Jerry Springer’s sensationalist and often disturbing talk show has done as much to bring trans peoples’ visibility to communities beyond queer communities as anyone else. However, the most famous trans person before Chaz Bono was arguably Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen is reputed to be the first North American to have gender-affirming surgery. Jorgensen’s story made her an extremely well-known public figure in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA. Jorgensen’s surgery and hormone treatments took place in Denmark. Apparently, what was new about Jorgensen’s gender affirmation was the use of hormones. Indeed, hormone treatments have become central to trans people’s desires to affirm their gender. Joanne Meyerowitz in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexualism in the United States chronicles Jorgensen’s life alongside the ways in which ideas about sex and gender change in the context of Jorgensen’s celebrity.³ One of the major contributions of Meyerowitz’s book is her demonstration of how a category like biological sex becomes mutable or changeable in the context of transsexualism. 

So, what is trans? Transgender means a person whose gender identity is different from the sex they are assigned at birth. Transgender people can sometimes alter their bodies to reflect their sex through hormones, surgical procedures, or cosmetic practices. The altering of the body can take many forms, from full to partial “re-making,” often referred to as transitioning. Over the years, many different terms have come to characterize trans people. Many of the terms misunderstand what was and is at stake for trans people. For example, terms like Transvestite, Drag Queen, and Crossdresser have often been used to describe trans people. However, while some trans people might make use of those cultural forms or practices as a route to transitioning, it should not be assumed that those forms are the same as being transgender. 

The debates concerning transsexualism complicate definitions of transgender. Transsexualism was seen to be a much more limited relationship to gender identity. Specifically, it referred to persons who sought to change their gender to align with their sex. Indeed, transsexual is the term often used in the medical literature and by medical professionals to treat people who are understood to be suffering from gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder. Scholars and activists like Susan Stryker understand transsexualism as a component of transgender.⁴ In Stryker’s view, transgender refers “to the widest imaginable range of gender-variant practices and identities”.⁵ I too will use non-binary transgender as a way to make sense of how and why I’m focused on Maroodi, a non-binary, trans, and queer Somali. A trans individual is a person born as male or female who might make a range of different interventions in and on the body to align their gender and sex. Maroodi is a Somali non-binary trans person who does not identify with any category of gender, and lives and identifies in various ways both in real life and on their social media platforms. 

It is important for me to write about the life of an African, Muslim non-binary trans person at this point in time given recent debates on the African continent and beyond concerning issues of sexuality, gender, and sexual practices. As scholars like Neville Hoad⁶ and Joseph Massad⁷ have cautioned, the manner in which the West seeks to find and help homosexuals in the global South might constitute an ongoing “imperial project.”⁸ Hoad makes his point in light of the ways in which Western gay activists have taken up the project of confronting African leaders on their homophobia, often with little regard for how their actions could reverberate for queer Africans at home, and often without consulting or working with queer African activists. Indeed, Hoad’s project demonstrates how international activism and national/local homophobia can both work to make African queer life appear non-existent. My writing about non-binary Somalis seeks to work in a similar vein as Hoad’s. I seek to demonstrate the lives of persons whose desire to be is both conditioned by queer, homophobic, religious, ethnic, cultural, and multiple national discourses. And yet, I am also demonstrating that subjects like Maroodi do not require a rescue mission for their life to have meaning. 

This paper is complicated by the fact that I am visualizing Africa in the West. Thus, Maroodi is not just African or just Western; they are a combination of both. What is particularly important is the way in which ideas about African-ness and Western-ness can in some instances still appear to be miles apart. What can often bring the West and Africa together is Blackness. Especially in North America, where Black people have a very long and intimate experience of life, Africanness, which often translates into Blackness, provides a lens through which to understand persons like Maroodi. 

Additionally, as mentioned above, Maroodi is neither a gay nor lesbian person (in fact they would identify as a non-binary trans), and therefore other complications of this essay are how to speak about them in terms of queer theory and studies, and how to be cautious about the ways in which LGBT studies and queer studies are not always the most effective way to think about non-binary trans people. And yet, queer studies still remain a useful way to proceed in terms of having the conversation about trans people. Below, I hope that these complications become much clearer while maintaining the ambiguity that is so necessary to queer theory and queer studies. 

I think that drag queens and ideas about drag queens among many trans women of colour work similarly as disidentification. So, while drag queens are most often not trans people, some drag queens use drag as the initial cosmetic route to transitioning. In the debates concerning queer, trans, and non-binary people, questions of race always add a significant complicating element. Drag queens play an extremely important role in the conversation, because in so many urban areas where queer communities make their home, drag queens of colour and Black drag queens always feature in those communities. In North American culture, questions of “race” and racism in queer communities remain highly charged concerns. Given that Black drag queens have been central to urban queer politics, their erasure always places difficult questions on the agenda. Most often when claims are made about the lack of visibility of Black or African queers in queer communities, Black drag queens are always somewhere in the history of the community, often not acknowledged or acknowledged in ways that belie their “race.” The existence of Black drag queens is crucial to understanding how some aspects (not all) of trans experience can apply to Black and African trans people. 

Performance is a major part of today’s everyday lives. It can take many shapes and forms; but for the purpose of this discussion, I’ll stick to social media performances. Scrolling through social media sites, you are bound to come across videos and photographs of queer and non-queer individuals performing for the camera. The selfie culture has contributed greatly to different variations of performativity, from thirst trapping to showcasing fine art. Maroodi’s Instagram images and videos, amongst others, have caught my attention and led me to think more about how individuals use cultural tropes to reinsert their existence within communities that might otherwise banish them for their gender and sexuality. 

In these images, Maroodi is clearly letting the viewer know of their cultural heritage by performing what Somalis refer to as “Somalinimo,” or the essence of being Somali. The Instagram screenshots of Maroodi also demonstrate the ways in which gender and sexuality are performed. Maroodi performs the oppositions of cultural heritage and their contemporary self to demonstrate different kinds of gender performance, and demonstrates how each kind of gender performance is also culturally produced and references historical cultural practices. 

In Figure 1, Maroodi is dressed up in Somali traditional attire from nomadic to contemporary. In these images we see the performative dress variations of “Somalinimo” that the subject wants the viewers to witness—hence, the image of them dressed in a blue headscarf with a Somali emoji flag in the background. This type of performativity is usually associated with longing for something beyond culture, but I would argue that it’s also a cry for belonging within North American diasporic communities. This form of queer diasporic longing is articulated well by Gayatri Gopinath when she writes: 

A queer diasporic framework productively exploits the analogous relation between nation and diaspora on the one hand, and between heterosexuality and queerness on the other: in other words, queerness is to heterosexuality as the diaspora is to the nation.⁹

This interdependence between nation and diaspora can lead to confusion, anxiety, and depression among both young and old queer Somalis in the diaspora. The thought of abandoning one for the other can at times be devastating. In his book Angry Queer Somali Boy, Mohamed Ali writes: 

In Somalia: Nation in Search of the State, the historian Samatar discusses the two currents that were at the centre of Somali culture. The first was an intense loyalty to family and the larger clan around it. The second current was the fierce independence rooted in nomadic journeys, which was the one that intrigued me the most.¹⁰

In most cases, individuals like Maroodi end up taking the second current mentioned by Ali, not abandoning their communities but enabling them to live their best life peacefully without running into familiar faces that have caused them harm and heartbreak. All this to say that some families can have a grip on an individual’s life that can sometimes be detrimental to growth and self-discovery. 

In Figure 2, Maroodi is dressed up in Western attire, and the only thing traditional about the images is the incense burner. Here we see the collapsing of a traditional Somali aesthetic used in ceremonies, cleansing the air and gothic Dracula aesthetic. Although the two aesthetics might appear to clash, they make total sense in this scenario. Maroodi here is embodying both Western and traditional Somali culture. Having grown up and experienced both cultures, it’s their right to interpret and reconfigure what works and what doesn’t within their own comfort zone. In these images, we see Maroodi performing for the camera, but l am also reading the image as giving the viewer, or perhaps their family members, an apologetic nod to who they’ve become and are becoming. In these images of Maroodi, I’m reminded of the Somali folklore associated with stories of Queen Arawelo and other deity figures in Somali popular culture. Akan Takruri notes that “Arawelo, was a Pagan Somali Queen in 15 AD…she was also known for defying gender roles”.¹¹ There are several ancient mythologies that Somalis believed in pre-Islam that involved deities and spirits. Akan notes that “Dhegdheer was a female cannibalistic demon who hunted in Somali forests, her victims were usually wandering or lost”.¹²

In this particular series of Instagram selfies, I’m reading them as representing Dhegdheer in the diaspora. These images also reinforce certain elements of Somaliness that might otherwise be forgotten in the diaspora by subverting it with a Halloween aesthetic, which is very Western. Here the images serve as an archive of mythologies that have been forgotten or ignored prior to colonization and Islamification. Gayatri Gopinath states: 

The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora—queer visual aesthetic practices that negotiate the intersection of race, sexuality, and migration in multiple geographic and national locations—open the vista to these alternative horizons of pleasure and possibility.¹³

I can only be anecdotal and claim that in Toronto, especially in the Church Street community, Black and African drag queens play an important role in trans politics. By this I mean that many of the current Black/African drag queens performing in the Church Street community would identify as trans. In another era, some of the older drag queens might have come out as trans too, but at the moment they could slip in and out of non-binary categories. My anecdotal evidence is largely based on friendships and conversations, as I have photographed many of these individuals and spoken to them about how they understand who they are. These people use drag as a means toward transitioning to a different gender. I am certain of this given my ongoing conversations with other Black transwomen I have photographed and been in conversation with. Many of these transitioning transwomen can be seen performing at Crews and Tangos, a nightclub on Church Street, most nights of the week. These Black/African “drag queens,” most of them in their twenties, will under other circumstances identify as trans or non-binary, and some of them are in various stages of transitioning using a wide array of interventions that can be cosmetic, hormonal, or surgical. They represent the incoherence of gender, masculinity, and femininity. 

The move from drag queen to non-binary to trans person in Black/African communities has become much easier as both hormones and surgeries have improved for trans people who want to change their bodies. Nonetheless, it is useful to note that many trans people (especially poor white people and people of colour) use illegal hormones and travel outside the country for surgeries at their own expense. Others seek to qualify through the CAMH program, which many activist trans people consider a kind of “torture” to achieve access to hormones and surgery. The complications of how people change their bodies, what elements of their bodies they change, and how they access the resources to do so are extremely complex. Many young Black/African transwomen in particular find themselves doing sex work to both provide daily sustenance and, if possible, accrue costs of bodily change outside the CAMH system. 

In a previous historical moment, it would be sometimes easily asserted that Black/African queers did not exist or were locked in the closet. Such statements, at least concerning Black/African trans people in Toronto, cannot be made today. Indeed, Black/African queer, non-binary, and trans people are taking up visual and political space everywhere. It is indeed refreshing to witness more and more queer, trans, and non-binary Black/Africans documenting their lives on social media platforms. I think their presence, sense of self, and confidence represents a new moment for Black/African queer life and lives. To document such lives is to resist the previous history where Black/African and other racialized bodies have been erased from North American queer histories, cultures, and communities. 

In Joseph Massad’s groundbreaking book, Desiring Arabs, he offers a very complex and complicated history of homosexuality in the Arab world and, most importantly for my purposes, in Islam.¹⁴ Massad points out how non-heterosexuality occupied and continues to occupy a place in Arab and Muslim societies that is different from Western understandings and, yet, is radically similar. Among the important points that Massad makes is the way in which Islamic nationalists in and outside the Arab world and Western LGBT activists often play from the same script. In fact, Massad suggests that the ways in which nineteenth-century anthological ideas continue to shape how we understand Arab and Muslim sexuality is important to how we make sense of ideas concerning sexual human rights in the contemporary moment.¹⁵ Massad, who is an extremely articulate critic of how Western human rights ideas and practices only understand what it means to be human on their own terms, offers a very important critique of how those ideas complicate homosexuality for Arabs and Muslims. He writes: 

The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating. In doing so, the human rights advocates are not bringing about the inclusion of the homosexual in a new and redefined human subjectivity, but in fact are bringing about her and his exclusion from this redefined subjectivity altogether while simultaneously destroying existing subjectivities organized around other sets of binaries, including sexual ones.¹⁶

Massad further argues that indeed the binary heterosexual/ homosexual is a Western idea that is imposed globally by the circulation and dominance of Western institutions, policies, and intellectuals. I am drawing on Massad to help assert my point that persons like Maroodi are not in need of rescue, because they already have embedded in their own cultures, complex and complicated ways of dealing with and living with sexual minority cultures. I want to stress that taking this position is not an excuse for transphobia and homophobia, but rather, I am attempting to explain, along with Massad, Hoad, and others, the ways in which the legacies of colonialism and imperialism shape debates on sexual minority cultures in the African, Black, and Muslim worlds. Nonetheless, we cannot deny that these cultures and peoples have long histories of living with sexual difference. Indeed, trans and non-binary people have always existed in Somali culture. 

Abdi Osman is a Somali-Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on questions of black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim and queer identities. Osman’s video and photography work has been shown in Canada and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. http://abdiosman.com 

1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4.
2. Keguro Macharia, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 4.
3. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in The United States (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).
4. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006.
5. Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 19.
6. Neville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
7. Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
8. Hoad, African Intimacies, xiii.
9. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 11.
10. Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali, Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019), 91.
11. Akan Takruri, 100 African Religions Before Slavery & Colonization. (S.l.: LULU COM, 2017), 93-94.
12. Takruri, 100 African Religions Before Slavery & Colonization, 92.
13. Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 61.
14. Joseph A Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
15. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 37.
16. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 41.

This article is published in issue 38.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue