Party Party!
A reading at Cubitt Gallery
Thursday 6-9pm 5th Feb
Moving from Bruce Boone’s theory of writing as partying — both as in having fun and being politically interested — Donna Marcus Duke wraps up her residency at The Writer’s Room by inviting friends she’s met through bookstores and dance floors, dark rooms and reading rooms for an evening of readings and music.
Featuring:
E.V.
Hesse K.
Reece P. Roberts
Sudeep Bhargava
Raymond E. Slacker
Francis Whorrall-Campbell
& Acid Sally
who’ll be finishing off the evening with a DJ set ❤️
Tickets are £5, but no one is refused for lack of funds. Drop Donna a message if you need guest list.
DONNA MARCUS: You’re a young trans multi-hyphenate riding the wave of identity politics in East London. Any chance you get, you leverage your identity to get a gig, write a think piece, or, most importantly, gain moral and social clout. You go to niche performance nights in Dalston, get flown out to Europe to write criticism on urgent queer exhibitions, you’re zealous in attending protests and posting infographics online — all of this confirms you as a morally, socially and culturally superior trans person. Your politics are perfect, radical and unchangeable. You’re that overeducated middle-class radical who’s convinced you’ll change the world, one Dazed article at a time.
But when your conservative father suddenly passes away, your edgy East London trans identity begins to crack. Faced with the reality of a parent’s death, you become increasingly cynical of the social and political scenes you’d dedicated your short life to. As you realise the ways in which you’ve commodified yourself for personal, political and professional gain, you ask: how honest have you been with who you are? Haunted by contradictions of your identity, you embark on a series of increasingly impossible benders and hook-ups in London to recover your sense of purpose, identity and community. Reality and fantasy blur as the books you read and the people you fuck and party with start to become indiscernible — force femme sessions with Kierkegaard; skiing with Audre Lorde; raving with Susan Sontag; chastity sessions with Deleuze; slime wrestling with Sartre all become lessons in the chaotic, fictive and murky nature of acquiring selfhood.
Below: Images From Cubitt Gallery (cllick to enlarge!)
