How do we perform our own identities? How do these performances of self give us entry into social groups and a sense of belonging? What drives the intensity of performing identity? This workshop invites participants to talk about performative identity and what it means to ‘belong’, taking Leila Weefur’s experimental film practice on the fantasy of Black gender presentation as a starting point for discussion.

This short lecture, screening, and discussion will explore the employment of colloquial language, cultural symbols, and performative behaviors in Black, Queer, gender-variant life. How do we escape the imposition of someone’s imagination about who we are and how we present ourselves to the world? This is an engagement on how to account for performances of racial and gender presentation, with an overwhelming concentration of dominant representations of Black and Queer identities in popular culture.

Maximum 20 participants. 

Part of the Contagious & Queer program.