Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 36, Number 2 (2015)

Dis-ing the Main Drag and Walking toward the Public Good in Here Be Dragons : Mapping Queer, Asian-Canadian Identity in Kitchener, Ontario

  • Andrew Houston
Submitted
December 21, 2015
Published
2015-10-01

Abstract

A young man, who self-identifies as Asian-Canadian and queer, decides to leave the small, socially conservative southwestern Ontario city where he has grown up. He decides to perform the story of this departure, its origins, its process, and its possible outcomes. The performance takes the form of a map, and before long he maps a terrain vastly different from what most who live in the city would recognize as home. As a performative process, mapping is explored as an attempt to apprehend where we are, who we are, and with whom we share the process. Mapping and walking together become an embodied experience carried out from a particular point of view that makes possible both an awareness of multiple perceptions of, and orientations toward, place. Walking and mapping are not just the combined acts of creative-research; they also serve as methodology. José Estaban Muñoz argues that “identities-in-difference” emerge out of a failed interpellation within the public sphere. Disidentifying with the dominant sphere allows for the emergence of a counter-public sphere; the landscape is the same, but the way it is mapped, used, and understood is different. Refuting both identification and counter-identification— or assimilation and anti-assimilation— disidentification allows for a third mode of dealing with dominant, embedded ideology that uses the idea of “working both on and against” as a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within. In this article, Andrew Houston articulates how disidentification was mapped and experienced as a form of dis-orientation in Here Be Dragons, a multi-media, site specific performance staged as part of IMPACT ’11, wherein the audience were invited on a journey of displacement; a mytho-geographical mapping of queer, Asian-Canadian identity in downtown Kitchener, Ontario. In Here Be Dragons, identities-in-difference are experienced as the audience—the tourists to this domain—walk within the testimonial terrain of a young man, navigating a landscape of edges and antagonism in their hometown.