Vaginal Davis

Early life

Growing up, Davis lived with her mother, originally from Louisiana, and four older sisters. Her mother was Black Creole, her father was of Mexican and Jewish descent, and her grandfather was of German descent, with Davis stating that he was born in Wannsee and was the "black sheep" of the von Hohenzollern dynasty. Davis' mother was a revolutionary feminist and community activist in the South Central area, and planted food gardens in vacant lots to help feed the homeless, impoverished, and marginalized peoples of the area. As a young child in the Los Angeles public education system, Davis was accepted into a program for gifted students, where she was first exposed to and developed a love of theater and opera. At age seven, Davis saw Mozart's The Magic Flute on a school trip to the opera, and credits this experience as a catalyst for her development as a drag queen.

Career

Davis' name pays homage to activist Angela Davis, and considers Davis' involvement with the Black Panther Party and activism as a whole to be one of her biggest inspirations, explaining, "They came into the schools, they had guns, and they took over. They were teaching us all these revolutionary songs and chants and what not. At that time, when Angela Davis was the most wanted woman in America, I was just fixated with that image of her. By the late '70s I had decided I sort of wanted to sexualize her name and become her, more or less. So I started in the late '70s calling myself Vaginal Davis. I started to perform– or tried to perform– at these gay clubs in Los Angeles, in Hollywood. The people in these clubs, they would look at me and say, 'Vaginal Davis? Well who are you supposed to be?' And I said, 'Well, Angela Davis– it's a homage to that.' And they'd say, 'Well who's that?' They didn't know who Angela Davis was."

Vaginal Davis is one of the founders of the homo-core punk movement. She chooses to exploit herself to engage in rude provocations and "gender-fucking." As a self-labeled "sexual repulsive", she is an icon of the disruptive performance aesthetic known as terrorist drag.

1970–1989: Career beginnings

Vaginal Davis' band the Afro Sisters released their first seven-inch EP Indigo, Sassafras & Molasses, produced by Geza X with Amoeba Records in 1978. The Afro Sisters opened for the Smiths on their first American tour, as well as the Happy Mondays.

Vaginal Davis is often associated with the formation of the Queercore zine movement. From 1982 to 1991, she self-published the zine Fertile La Toyah Jackson, focused on the imaginary adventures of a skateboarding, pregnant Jackson, and hailed by The Advocate critic Adam Block as "A veritable John Waters film of a skinny 'zine." Bruce LaBruce described the zine as "an underground rag that featured SoCal punk scene gossip, photos of hot Huntington Beach surfers and wistful musings by Miss Davis themself." Through Davis' job at UCLA's Placement & Career Planning Center, she was allowed free access to a Xerox machine to publish the zine. Davis went on to develop the zine into a series of videos titled Fertile LaToyah Jackson Video Magazine, Volume 1 and 2.

1989–1999: Bands

Davis was well known for her band ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo, where she assumed the persona of a -year-old Latina named Graciela. Band mates included longtime collaborator Alice Bag as Sad Girl and Fertile LaToyah Jackson as Guadalupe, ages 16 and respectively.

In 1989, Davis formed the speed metal thrash band Pedro, Muriel, and Esther (PME) with Glen Meadmore. In PME, Davis performs as Clarence, "a white-supremacist militia-man from Idaho complete with ZZ Top beard." Davis had previously sung backup vocals for Meadmore, with RuPaul. PME disbanded after releasing a four-song EP on Amoeba records.

Davis formed the band Black Fag in 1992 with Bibbe Hansen. Through the persona Rayvn Cymone McFarlane, Davis parodied the LA alternative scene, while engaging in performative actions such as spraying the audience with milk from her bra. Black Fag's album Passover Satyr was released by Dischord Records that same year and was produced by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. The band's 1995 album 11 Harrow House was produced by Hansen's son Beck.

In 1995, Pedro, Muriel, and Esther reunited for a performance at the Queercore '95 festival in Chicago. The band later released their first full-length album The White to Be Angry, produced by Steve Albini in 1998 on Spectra Sonic Records.

2000–2009: Move to Germany

In Los Angeles, Davis has hosted and DJ'd a range of performance and music events, one of the most prominent being "Bricktops" (2002–2005), a weekly salon/speak-easy inspired by vaudevillian Ada "Bricktop" Smith. they also hosted and DJed a Sunday afternoon music event called "Sucker" (1994–2000). Davis and artist Ron Athey curated and hosted GIMP (2000–2001), a monthly night of performance art.

In 2006, Vaginal Davis moved from Los Angeles to Berlin, Germany.

In 2009, Pedro, Muriel and Esther reunited in a 20th-anniversary show presented in New York City by Participant Inc. as part of Performa 09.{{cite press release |access-date = 2013-03-23 |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120426052043/http://participantinc.org/uncategorized/advanced-capitalism-reunion-reparations-and-retardations/ |archive-date = April 26, 2012 |url-status = dead

2010–present: Performance, visual art, and teaching

Davis' performance piece "Speaking from the Diaphragm" ran from May 15 to 27, 2010, at Performance Space 122. The show parodied television talk shows and featured interviews by Carole Pope, Jamie Stewart, Joel Gibb, and Glen Meadmore and was co-hosted by Carmelita Tropicana and Jennifer Miller.

In January 2012 Davis participated in the J. Paul Getty's "Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival, with "My Pussy Is Still in Los Angeles (I Only Live in Berlin)" at Southwestern Law School, Louis XVI-style Tea Room (originally Bullocks Wilshire Department Store). April 2012, Davis debuted live her band Tenderloin as part of the festival "Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life" at Hebbel am Ufer. Tenderloin's line-up consisted of Felix Knoke, Jan Klesse, Joel Gibb, and Vaginal Davis performing under the alias "Dagmar Hofpfisterei.". In August 2012 the band was invited by curator Anthony Hegarty to perform at the Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in London with Kembra Pfahler and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. After the performances Tenderloin released the music video for "The Golden One" that featured drag queen the Goddess Bunny and was directed by Glen Meadmore.

From November 9 to December 16, 2012, Davis opened her first major solo exhibition of solely visual art (as opposed to performance art), titled "HAG – small, contemporary, haggard" at the Participant Inc. in New York. The name of the show is based on the gallery that Davis hosted in her Los Angeles apartment from 1982–89.

Davis has traveled to various universities and educational institutions to give lectures on her life experiences, including a talk on youth hosteling at New York University's Performance Studies complex in November 2015 with German actress and friend Susanne Sachsse. From December 1 to 5 of the same year, Davis teamed with avant-garde music group Xiu Xiu when they composed the score for her radical re-imagining of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, performed at the 80WSE Gallery at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, in partnership with Berlin's CHEAP Kollectiv.

In mid-October 2016, Davis was a keynote speaker at the Creative Time Summit in Washington, D.C., a conference on art and social issues which featured workshops and speeches on topics ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to electoral politics.

In 2024, her work was included in Xican-a.o.x. Body a major group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, which traveled from the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, California. A scholarly publication was released by Chicago University Press in tandem with the show.

Sources

• José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
• Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

References

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5. Boshier, Rosa. (2020-08-03). "''We Paid For This Town'': The Legacy of Chicanx Punk in LA".
6. Monaghan, Connie. (May 1997). "Vaginal Creme Davis". Coagula Art Journal.
7. "Vaginal Davis Dot Com: Discography". VaginalDavis.com.
8. Sanchez, John. (May 15, 1997). "In Performance: Vaginal Davis unplugged". [[Chicago Reader]].
9. LaBruce, Bruce. "Vaginal Davis". [[Butt (magazine).
10. Cooper, Dennis. (July 1994). "Who's got the 10 1/2?".
11. "Vaginal Davis Dot Com: Zineography". VaginalDavis.com.
12. Trebay, Guy. (May 23, 2004). "Ready to Fade into Obscurity. Wait, He's Already There". [[The New York Times]].
13. Maher, Karen. (October 2011). "Mono. Issue No. 6 – October 2011: Page 2". Mono.
14. Commondenominator, Lois. (1997). "Vaginal Davis: Speaking from the Diaphragm". Dragazine.
15. (1991). "Pedro, Muriel & Esther – PME / EP (Vinyl)". [[Discogs]].
16. Kot, Greg. (September 1, 1995). "What a Drag". [[Chicago Tribune]].
17. (March 15, 2012). "Vaginal Davis Is Speaking from the Diaphragm". [[Time Out (magazine).
18. H, Erika. (April 29, 2010). "Jamie Stewart guest stars in performance piece by Vaginal Davis; Xiu Xiu tour, make antiquated entreaty for a lock of your hair". [[Tiny Mix Tapes]].
19. (July 6, 2010). "Vaginal Davis". [[Studio Museum in Harlem]].
20. [http://pacificstandardtimefestival.org/events/my-pussy-is-still-in-los-angeles-i-only-live-in-berlin-by-vaginal-davis/ My Pussy Is Still in Los Angeles (I Only Live in Berlin) - was produced by West of Rome Public Art for Pacific Standard Time] {{webarchive. link. (February 22, 2014 , and curated by [[Emi Fontana]])
21. (April 12, 2012). "Camp/Anti-Camp sets up in Berlin". Expatriarch.
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36. This Is Not a Dream. (2017-06-03). "THIS IS NOT A DREAM - Vaginal Davis".
37. Dunham, Grace. (2015-12-12). "The "Terrorist Drag" of Vaginal Davis".
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39. Fitzgerald, Ali. (June 25, 2013). "A Look Back at the Career of Vaginal Davis".
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41. (October 11, 2018). "Vaginal Davis Wins $10,000 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement".
42. (August 24, 2004). "Le Tigre – Feminist Sweepstakes (Vinyl, LP, Album)". [[Discogs]].
43. "Technova – Electrosexual (CD, Album)". [[Discogs]].
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45. (23 February 2011). "The Advocate for Fagdom". Variety.
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47. Oler, Tammy. (October 31, 2019). "57 Champions of Queer Feminism, All Name-Dropped in One Impossibly Catchy Song".