"Exorcising the Phantasmagorical: Mutant Salon's Radical Bad Drag."

This paper will review the Los Angeles-based collective Mutant Salon, co-founded by visual artists Young Joon Kwak and Marvin Astorga in 2012, as a critical agent against assimilative and sanitized gender performativity and platform for radical drag resistance. Mutant Salon operates as a beauty salon and collaborative staging that “strives to foster connections between queer, trans, POC, womyn, and mutant communities,” and the myriad of services, treatments, and performances offered by the salon functions as an interjection into normalizing discourses of dominant western aestheticism (specifically that of whiteness/essentialized femininity). As the performative practice of drag becomes increasingly subsumed into commercial enterprises and entities, it has become especially urgent to distinguish between corporate, desexualized, and resistant/minoritarian modalities of drag and how its role within spheres of contemporary gendered and queer resistance continues to be impacted and informed by white hegemony. The salon formally acknowledges the historic and ongoing erasure of drag artists of color which has informed its community-centered platform that strives to serve and represent historically marginalized groups. This paper will explore the reactionary components of white gay culture and the colonial origins of racialized gender impersonation. The salon’s dynamic and temporal composition as a traveling platform highlights a subjective dis/possession emblematic to those “reduced
to marginality in regimes of power.” Utilizing Julian Fleisher’s The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to differentiate between the dominant stylizations of drag, this paper will examine Mutant Salon’s tactically employed bad drag as a critical site for counter-hegemonic gender performativity.