The pleasure is all ours : race and queerness in the Promised Land

This paper calls for a queer art and politics that treats identity categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class and others as co-constitutional. With the writer's one-man show, Promised Land: A Radical Queer Revival, as its central text, this paper describes a performance of co-constitutionality that acknowledges the artist's subordinate and privileged statuses through carnivalesque performance tropes such as humor, open sexuality and audience interaction. The first chapter uses media and performance studies to address the investment in whiteness by heteronormative gay politics and culture. The second chapter explores the creation of a racially constituted queer world in Promised Land through the performance and its intertexts. The conclusion offers a notion of performing "the utopian identity" as a means of engaging with and resisting normative hegemony.