ABSTRACT
This writing is perfume. I make it behave in the ways I find perfume to behave, especially when used by drag queens. Perfume’s use is always productive of a layered expression of performed identity, whether self-determined or compulsory. Perfume as drag contests and resists not only gender normativities but also the conditions of commodification, exchange, and circulation under capitalism by which such conventions—and more, subjecthood per se—are developed within culture. The objective of such strategies is not a total collapse of a capitalist framework but rather an expanded field of transgressive potential within these spaces of control. Working from examples of perfume and scent employed by Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, the drag performer Divine in the films of John Waters, and celebrity drag queen RuPaul, I track the ways that withdrawal, refusal, disorientation, contradiction, and potentially critical mimesis at close range might prove disruptive—demonstrating capacities for irony and parody, for tensions to be rendered legible between the voluntarism of individuality supposed possible in our present cultural era and potential ways that hegemonic power may be made sensible through strategic forms of participation and critique.
