Inhuman drag: Getting under the sk(e)ins of the posthuman in conversation with Charity Kase

Abstract

This article is the culmination of a collaborative process with drag artist Charity Kase. Providing both transcriptions of our conversation and sections of theoretical commentary, I come to test and transform what constitutes the (post)human. Aspects of Charity’s drag – its mediality and virtuality, its hybrid monstrosity and beauty and its anthropomorphic abjections of bodies and environments – embrace the disordered and damaged dimensions of human life on earth. This article introduces an inhuman turn, emphasizing how bodily borders are broken down when the inside is re-turned through staged fantasy and shared imaginaries, as a strategy for challenging phallo- and anthropocentric stereotypes, and the opening of a potential within for becoming without. Tracing some differences in my and Charity’s senses of what drag can do, this article offers up a figure for post/in/human possibilities.