Queer of colour hauntings in London’s arts scene: performing disidentification and decolonising the gaze. A case study of the Cocoa Butter Club

Abstract

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship.