POST BROTHERS

"Manly Deeds, Womanly Words: Border Crossing in the Old Line State"
Tonight, on Monday, April 6, 2009, is a performance that will take over a commuter ferry to stage a drag show. PLEASE JOIN US.
Featuring local drag performers MuthaChucka, Raya Light and John Turleen Whelan, the event will take place on the 7:20 San Francisco-Larkspur ferry, floating through the Bay at sunset. We will board the ferry, set up a stage, and mount a series of performances.

The Mason-Dixon Line at the top of Maryland is historically regarded as the cultural boundary between the Northern and Southern United States. Nicknamed the "Old-line State," Maryland has a history rooted in the blurring and transgressing of this border. Maryland's motto, "Fatti maschii, parole femine" (manly deeds, womanly words), reflects another ideological boundary: that gender is socially produced and partitioned through performative acts and codes.

An epicenter for binary opposition and traversal, Maryland's past is made up of many events of border-crossing, instances of sociopolitical and cultural androgyny, role-playing for various ends. For this installment of Americana, two historical figures of Maryland are used as ciphers for exploring the intersection of binaries and how they are transgressed through hybridized adornment and disguise.

Richard Thomas Jr. was raised on Mattapany, a family plantation in Maryland. He was an adventurer and Confederate army officer, trained at West Point military academy. He served with Garibaldi fighting for Italian independence, where he encountered zouave regiments incorporated into various armies. These soldiers styled their uniforms and training strategies after French Algerian and Berber soldiers, wearing fez caps, loose trousers, blue high-cut jackets and leather leggings. Thomas' enthusiasm for the cultural hybridity of 19th century colonial Europe, reflected in the orientalist dress of the zouave soldiers, led him to adopt the last name of Zarvona.

During the Civil War, Zarvona broke from his state's Union affiliation and became the Colonel of the First Regiment of Baltimore Zouaves, made up of rebel Marylander confederates. He became infamous when he seized the Union-bound passenger steamer St. Nicholas from Baltimore during the first year of the Civil War by dressing in women's clothing as Madame LaForte, "the French lady." Speaking in sophisticated French and accent-tinged English, Madame Laforte flirted with the passengers before joining a crew of disguised accomplices to commandeer the ship. He and his crew were able to hijack the steamer and two smaller ships loaded with provisions and Zarvona was hailed a confederate hero upon his return, continuing to appear as the "French Lady" until his death.

Another border crosser in Maryland's history is the actor, Harris Glenn Milstead, known most famously as the drag queen Divine. Born in Towsen, Maryland, Milstead performed in theatre and movies, most notably in his boyhood friend John Water's movie troupe, the Dreamlanders. Milstead's Divine was an abject and conspicuous caricature who often transgressed the boundaries of moral conduct, exaggerating feminine sexuality and style. Divine operates as a symbol of bodily transgression rooted in Maryland as a site of line crossing. Embellishing the mixed Northern and Southern style of Marylander women to a gregarious degree, and incorporating primitivist and comical makeup and dress, Milstead exposed the absurdity inherent in the control of conduct. In Water's movie, Female Trouble, Milstead played two roles: one as a man, another as a woman who is raped by the man Milstead plays. In this situation, Milstead confronted the dual identities produced in his performances, and exposed the shifting roles of the body within a regulated sphere.

Richard Thomas Zarvona's story reflects a series of border crossings, including his orientalist fascination with the zouaves, his secessionist rebellion in spite of his home state's union affinities, his camouflaged cross-dressing performance, and his subversive breaching of the border line. Exploring cultural and gender androgyny as an operation of crossing the "old line," Manly Deeds, Womanly Words connects Zarvona's gender subversive role-playing as a means of "passing" beyond a politicized boundary to the zouave as a form of cultural and orientalist drag presentation. Divine's performative drag identity is used as a way of resisting stable and binary gender identifications. Combining the role-playing strategies of civil war reenactments and drag performance, Manly Deeds, Womanly Words involves a subversive re-staging of the Zarvona story as a drag show, culminating in an exhibition of documents and recordings of this event as well as a publication of a catalogue in the form of a playbill. The exhibition investigates the performance of identity, the various moments that borders are crossed through subversive attire, and how the exaggeration and appropriation of cultural and gendered models provides for a third term, a hybrid and transgressive transvestitism.

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