Page 86 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

80 CULTURAL STUDIES

at the bottom of a middle-aged white American male, whose moaning we
heard earlier. Throughout this opening scene, the young boy does not
make a sound. To me, his face expresses a combination of pleasure and
terror which consummates in his silence. The feeling of terror later
becomes evident when the American reveals, in a casual manner, that it is
his last visit. He is going to return to the United States, a sign of the
termination of financial support the boy receives from the ‘relationship’.
The boy’s worst nightmare has just become reality.
Under the circumstances, who can blame the boy for being silent and
passive?
The queer cult film of 1994, Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, puts drag extravaganza
on the road. In the queer jouissance found in the carnivalesque celebration of the
crisis of gender—what Marjorie Garber (1992) has called the articulation of the
‘Third term’—the Australian film inserts an Asian showgirl into the male
redneck country. In the film’s general overestimation of the transvestic object—
again, a third term embroidered on the bodies of three drag queens—this Asian
showgirl descends on the carnival scene, stereotypically, from the misty
underworld of a Bangkok or an Olongapo. In a spectacular move, she outperforms
the queer trio. Her special talent is at the same time her ‘indigenous’ gift:
shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina. Thus, in the hysterical thrust of queer
parody of the feminine masquerade, Priscilla lingers long enough in its
reinscription of the woman, as a hysterical figure of the Asian showgirl and as
femme castratrice. Apparently, in the competition for male fetishism, the Asian-
womanas-vagina serves as the stable surface upon which the high heels of queer
performativity trample. The cultural overestimation of white transvestic
sovereignty—the ‘queen of the desert’ as queer articulation—relies on the
resubordination of diasporic Asiatic femininity.
Later, when this Asian woman decides to get on the road herself (it seems that
Asian women are always constantly on the road), don’t expect her to display
feminine bravada, like a Thelma or a Louise, because her only ammunitions
against male captivity are her ping-pong balls.
Still later, at the very end of the queer saga, in the film’s continued emphasis
on the pleasure of the fetish, one may say that she makes a dramatic return as the
figure of a sex doll back to the bosom of the archaic orientalist scene of an Asian
temple. The woman, as the temple of the perfect fetish, remains as plasticity, as
hole.
Marjorie Garber theorizes the transvestite in this way: ‘The “third” is a mode
of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question
the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge’ (1992:11). In this
theoretical construct, it seems clear that the ascendance of the transvestic ‘space
of possibility’ is achieved through questioning, if not in expense of, the
possibility of ‘identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge’. In the context of
Priscilla, what space of possibility is accorded the diasporic Asian woman, that