What Tammy Found Out … About Being Femme
Since the early 1980’s Lois Weaver and other ultra
femmes have been making performances that celebrate the drag queen in all of
us. Resisting and challenging expectations of what it means to be female, they
are the women who impersonate women. Lois’s
long-term partner in this is Tammy WhyNot who took up residence in Lois’s body
in the 1970’s. Arriving fully formed like Venus on a Tour Bus, dressed in pink
and orange chiffon, Tammy claims to be a trailer park survivor who gave up a career in country
music to become a lesbian performance artist and has now become a university
professor.
In this
performance lecture Tammy will be offering a frontline report on her favourite
subject: the importance of being femme, being seen and being seen as a femme. She will be drawing from the
development of FeMUSEum,
a collaborative project with Bird la Bird, Amy Lamé and Carmelita
Tropicana for Performance Matters (2011) that celebrates feminine lineage and
legacy, but she will also talk about what she and Lois have found out about femme
visibility from over 63 years of collective research.
Price: € 7, € 5 (students
and pensioners upon submission of an identity card, and self-employed in
culture), unemployed free entry. There’s a single ticket covering both
performances in Glej Theatre.
Part of Just Like a Woman programme.