(Dis)embodiment: Danielle Abrams’s Quadroon and the Destabilization of Visual Identities

Abstract

Danielle Abrams’s performance art critically engages with late twentieth-century debates on race, queerness, and identity, positioning her as a vital figure in challenging monolithic and heteronormative structures of identity. Her early work Quadroon (1998), a live performance and four-channel video installation blending music, costume, gesture, and speech, compounds impassioned debates within the art world and beyond around the impact of multiculturalism on identity-based art, the invisibility of Jews of color and other marginalized members of the Jewish community, and the state of Black/Jewish relations in the United States following the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Abrams’s pieces frequently negotiate the tensions and intersections between her Black and Jewish familial heritage and her lesbian identity through the embodiment of semi-fictional personae grounded in family lore, self-perceptions, and cultural stereotypes. This paper explores how Abrams destabilizes the readability of “authentic” identities on the surface of the body in Quadroon via her adoption of personifications of her Black grandmother, her Jewish great grandmother, her identification as a butch lesbian, and her (unsuccessful) teenage attempt at passing for Greek. Pairing video recordings of each character with interludes from an unpublished performance script, I consider the anxieties of passing expressed in the personas of Dew Drop and Janie Bell, and through the lens of Abrams’s diaries, pose Butch in the Kitchen’s potential as an indefinite body to queer socially imposed constructions of monolithic and essentialist identity.

1. Introduction

I know myself through my oppressor. I resolve my race hybridity thru my gender hybridity.—Danielle Abrams, undated diary entry (personal journal entry, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 6, undated)

Forging identity and belongingness, especially for the recognition of oneself as American, Jewish, lesbian, Black, or any group label, is an ongoing tug-of-war between understanding oneself relative to others and the socially invoked essentialisms—often by the loudest or most influential voices—adopted to distinguish one group from another. Within marginalized social groups, the “regulating” of authenticity and perceived adherence to shared attributes, while often intended to protect, preserve, and advocate for the community, also serves to ostracize currently excluded members who identify as multiply marginalized, such as Jews of color or queer orientation. Tensions around the gatekeeping of contemporary identities—indeed, of the structure of identities in themselves—manifested in the 1990s and early aughts in academia and visual production through discourses such as postidentity and postethnicity. Selfhood as envisioned through the postidentity was reconfigured not as static, monolithic, and heteronormative but as innately hybrid, inconstant, and habitually boundary-crossing.

Defining and asserting the parameters of particular identities has been an especially enduring challenge for the Jewish people, for whom recognizing their diverse and intersectional nature signals existential crises around what binds them all together. Artistic representations of the diversity of Jewishness—the literal “face” of Jewishness as held alongside and in tension with other facets of identity—testify to both the rich cultural complexity of our community and the limited attention given to the experiences of multiply marginalized Jewish American artists. In this piece, I examine the work of self-identified queer multiracial performance artist Danielle Abrams, particularly how her 1998 performance and video installation Quadroon navigates the entanglements of Jewish, Black,1 and lesbian belongingness through the embodiment of four personas. These characters are grounded in Abrams’s Jewish (great)2 grandmother, identified as Dew Drop Lady; her Black grandmother Janie Bell; her lesbian alter-ego Butch in the Kitchen (or BIK); and Dee, her teenage attempt to pass for Greek. Narrative interludes throughout the performance allude to the turmoil of synchronously conforming to and inhabiting expectations of several pieces of oneself. Pairing video recordings of each character with interludes from an unpublished performance script, I explore how Abrams destabilizes the corporeal readability of “authentic” identities by exploiting visual codes of music, costume, gesture, and speech. I consider the anxieties of passing expressed in the personas of Dew Drop and Janie Bell, and through the lens of Abrams’s above epigraph, pose the potential of Butch in the Kitchen as an indefinite body to queer socially imposed constructions of monolithic and essentialist identity.

2. Methodologies/Approaches

Abrams’s teaching career and artistic practice spanned several universities and projects, including Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, her last post as a professor of practice and performance at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from 2014 to 2022. Despite her academic and artistic accomplishments, public information about her projects, exhibition history, and engagement in academic scholarship is limited. Existing scholarship on Quadroon, one of Abrams’s best-known early works, is scarce save for Lisa E. Bloom’s feature in Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity and a handful of brief write-ups in exhibition catalogs and press releases. A dedicated analysis of the personal and cultural symbolism of Abrams’s personae in this piece and the use of her body as a canvas for the exploration, destabilization, and representation of hybridized identities is overdue.

The Tufts University Archival Research Center in Medford, Massachusetts began compiling Abrams’s papers, journals, drawings, photographs, and video recordings in the months following her unexpected death in April 2022, some of which have recently become available for academic research. As expected in any archive, information gaps hinder a complete contextualization of Quadroon within Abrams’s life and work; no recordings of a live performance of the piece were found, though both a complete script and what appears to be a full taping of the video pieces for each persona were accessible. Fortunately, the scripts for each character read very similarly in the jump from live show to recording, aside from the use of music at the beginning and conclusion of film segments and their replacement with interludes in the performance piece. Utilizing several of the above resources, this chapter is a starting point for parsing the symbolism of her cast of characters and how we might relate to them as spectators rather than a definitive statement of the work’s intended meaning.

In addition to Abrams’s journals, scripts, and recordings, I read Quadroon within discourses of social identity construction. I will examine how Abrams’s personas embody the tensions between race and cultural identity, employing W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness concerning the Black experience of White culture and the extension of this theory into Jewish assimilation as “off-whiteness” as described by scholars like Karen Brodkin and David Schraub. Homi Bhabha’s conception of liminal identity and Jose Esteban Muñoz’s treatise on disidentification frame my reading of Abrams’s usage of humorously overblown stereotype and bodily adornment to disarm viewers and visually dismantle Black, Jewish, and queer identities as compartmentalized, hierarchized, or mutually exclusive categorizations. Ending where I began, I take Abrams’s intriguing quote about her racial and cultural hybridity as a starting point for exploring the gender fluidity of butchness and how Butch in the Kitchen poses possibilities for the material and intellectual existence of intersectional identities.

3. Who Was Danielle Abrams?

Danielle Abrams was born to Stephanie Belkin and Eddie Abrams in North Hempstead, Long Island, on 30 March 1968 (Figure 1). Her father, Eddie, was Black, and her mother was Jewish. Abrams was raised in nearby Flushing, a subdivision of Queens considered a haven for vibrant and varied immigrant communities from Asia and Europe.

Amidst this cultural diversity Abrams developed a keen awareness of the thorniness of cultural hybridity within the context of the so-called American “melting pot” that would become central to her art. Childhood trips to nearby Coney Island, for example, arise repeatedly in her work as a raw critique of mid-century American idealism and a visualization of a gathering place for social “misfits”. Coney Island’s social conglomeration of identities seemingly reflected the self-perceptions Abrams would grapple with throughout her oeuvre, including using the amusement park as the backdrop for Dew Drop Lady’s video narrative.

After attending Queens College at CUNY, she relocated to California for her MFA at UC Irvine, where she first developed the characters that would congregate in Quadroon and punctuate her work as a whole. She wrote of her experience at Irvine in a statement for the Artists in Residence Program at the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY:

Suffice it to say that my perception of my identity which was once limited to that of a queer butch woman, who was by the way black, expanded into a much more complex configuration of identity where I began to examine not just my Blackness, but my light-skinned Blackness, in relation to my Jewishness, my queerness, my gender, and my position as an artist coming from a working-class family.

(Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, 21 May 2001: 2)

Abrams conducted several solo and group performance projects within the radical queer community of San Francisco in the 1990s, including the first appearance in 1995 of the character Butch in the Kitchen, who manipulated food stamps as a means to operate a meal plan service for her local queer community.

Quadroon interrogates the tensions between aspects of her identity—particularly Blackness and Ashkenazi Jewishness—that manifest complex issues of appropriation, racial conflict, and the problematics of multiracial identity through tapping into sensory stereotypes in the personae of her family members. Her rapid adjustment from character to character explicitly refuses the fixity of interpellation, materializing the intangible social and cultural barriers that force difficult choices around the projection of orderly, easily recognizable identities and the conundrum of resolving inherited (whether considered learned or biological) and self-selected affiliations. In her 2002 speech for “Is Anything Alright? Three Generations of Jewish Women Artists in Postwar America: The 2nd Annual Mildred and George Weissman Lecture”, at The Jewish Museum, New York, Abrams describing the work as both a family and self-portrait. She further stressed that Quadroon accomplished its expression of this enduring conflict and multiplicity through, contrarily, the momentary isolation of its major contributors, both their factual existence and their recognition as fictional types:

Engendering a collage in motion…. The pieces of my identity are teased out and lay singular—the black grandmother, the Jewish grandmother, etc. This strategy speaks back to the idea that perhaps the multiplicated identity, specifically the Black Jew, might privilege the most socially desirable parts of her identity and silently conceal, or pass over, those parts that produce anxiety…This operation is what rethreads their singular selves into a newfound whole…Schmatas and fried chicken, disco purses and geri curl weaves become as impossible as ethnic signifiers as the language which one sought to measure one’s race based upon her drops of black blood…(Danielle Abrams Papers, 6 November 2002).

The title Quadroon invokes oppressive, rigid categorical systems linking skin color and character to physiology to perpetuate racist power structures since the 19th century, a reference rebuked both in the historical reality of Abrams’s blended family lineage and the equal cohabitation of the four personae (and the chameleon-like shifting of bodily features among the characters) within her one body. Within the work, Abrams’s body becomes a conduit for defying and confusing the borders of language and static classification. The unruly, interwoven personalities of Quadroon transcend orderly classifications of race, gender, ethnicity, and affiliation in their refusal to adhere to social categories; to “vocalize the barely audible hiss of family secrets as they seek, in an often-earnest manner, to vigorously and muscularly tackle institutionalized societal orders” (Artist Statement, Danielle Abrams Papers, undated). Quadroon seems to taunt the echoes of political oppression in blood quantum and miscegenation laws that both exoticize and preclude the precariousness of Abrams’s multidimensional existence.

The work itself has taken several forms, including a four-channel closed-system video installation and a live performance directed by Moira Cutler. Transitions from one character to another depend upon the format of the work: while the recorded videos float like islands amidst the isolation of blank gallery walls, the performance is punctuated by transitional vignettes featuring childhood memories and historical/cultural references to concepts of passing, conformity to expectations of Black performativity, and the social alienation of multiracial identities. In one exhibition (Figure 2 and Figure 3), a dimly lit gallery spotlights four televisions framed by roughly two-foot steel “cages”, one on each wall.

The cages are open in the front to allow viewing, casting spectral shadows below each monitor. Each character speaks individually, but they also talk over and amongst each other. Abrams’s collective embodiment of these characters forms a powerful sensory experience of the complex communications between Self and Other, exposing the sensitive conflicts of individual assertion versus social interpellation in forming multiply marginalized identities.

4. Quadroon and the (Im)possibilities of Queer Jewish Multiraciality

Situating Quadroon within broader contexts of late twentieth-century Black/Jewish American relations and trends in identity based art, particularly events happening in Abrams’s familial backyard, clarifies the pressure Abrams expressed around choosing between her “selves”. Despite relative solidarity during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s–1960s, relations between American Jews and Blacks broke down in the late 20th century, peaking with the Crown Heights riots against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, NY, in August 1991, just seven years before Quadroon debuted (Dollinger 2018).3 Distrust, widespread suspicions of racism and anti-Semitism, and lack of communication between the two communities intensified after accusations of Jewish favoritism among first responders on the scene of an accidental car crash between Chabad Lubavitch member Yosef Lifsh and Gavin and Angela Cato, two Guyanese American children (where Gavin ultimately died), and the burgeoning national popularity of controversial figures like Louis Farrakhan.

Furthermore, merely recognizing the existence of Jews of color has been an ongoing exercise in self-critique within Jewish communal institutions and cultural production. As Marc Dollinger relates in his epilogue to Black Power, Jewish Politics (2018), even scholars of Black/Jewish relations have until recently primarily characterized this intercommunal relationship as one of crossing a “racial divide” that “‘others’ communities of color as objects, or at best beneficiaries, of (white) Jewish benevolence” (Dollinger 2018, p. 189).4 Commenting on the racist and often reductive American attitudes around the biological qualifications for Blackness and Jewishness (which dictate one Black ancestor and a Jewish mother, respectively), Naomi Zack states that for Jews of color, predicating Jewishness on perceived Whiteness negates the possibility of both:

Most contemporary American Jews and Gentiles designate Jews as racially white. So is the person who is black and Jewish with a Jewish mother white? No, she is black, and in terms of official racial designation, her whiteness is obliterated. If Jewishness necessarily entails whiteness, then that means that her Jewishness is also obliterated.

(Zack 1996, p. 142)

Dismantling the standards and stereotypes of the heterosexual Euro-Ashkenazi Jew within the realm of the visual, a task I claim Quadroon attempts, is thus indicative of a more holistic retooling of the parameters of contemporary Jewishness itself.

While not exclusively geared toward multiracialism, the American Jewish art world in the late 20th to early 21st centuries also challenged the “authenticity” and exclusivity of traditional representations of Jewishness as static, heteronormative, and caucasian. Exhibitions such as the Jewish Museum New York’s Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities5 (1996–1997) and The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography (2005–2006), The Spertus Museum in Chicago’s The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation (2007–2008), as well as several of the Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco’s communally engaged projects in this period aimed to not only expand what Jewishness looks like, but also to explore the intersectionality of Jewishness with an intricate and often shifting web of identifications. As The New Authentics curator Staci Boris writes in the introduction to the exhibition’s catalog:

Authenticity describes a person’s connection to his or her true internal spirit or character vis-a-vis the external world. It is about maintaining individual consciousness without falling prey to imposed dictates, self-centeredness, or, more perilously, to insistence on ‘purity’. It is non-dictatorial…. An authentic identity is therefore neither nowhere, or, just as easily, everywhere

(Boris et al. 2007, p. 23).6

Such exhibitions openly engaged with broader academic and political discourses, from David Hollinger’s conception of postethnicity (Hollinger 1995) to Touré’s post-blackness (Touré 2011). Touré pivoted from multiculturalist structures of identity as homogenous, inherited, and particularistic, which for those affiliated with minority group often meant aligning oneself monolithically in solidarity with a marginalized community. Unpacking and embracing the self as constructed of innately multiple, permeable, and coexistent identities marked an acute repositioning of identity-based art as representational and political objects for the authentication and advocacy of identity groups. Exhibitions like The New Authentics, indebted to the antiessentialism of Blackness and critiques of group protectivism and heteropatriarchy in the infamous Freestyle exhibition at The Studio Museum, Harlem (2001), visually critiqued and defied confining and often unrelatable categorizations of Jewish artistic and social “belongingness”. Abrams’s questioning of her authenticity, and authenticity in general, via the multiplicity of identity categories commanding attention in Quadroon offers an alternative to the siloed organization of identity, art, and art history.

Despite interpersonal tensions between the Black and Jewish American communities and the distinct historical and cultural loci around which they coalesce, then, they clearly share frustrations with the limitations placed upon their belongingness by both mainstream society and their circles of origin. Quadroon expresses and expands this conundrum by compounding the problem of double consciousness beyond the color line and across multiple identity group affiliations simultaneously. W.E.B. Du Bois conceived of double consciousness in White patriarchal society as the naturalization of a Lacanian ideological system of racialization (Gordon 2008, p. 88) that engenders an ongoing, irreconcilable, competing sense of self between an individual’s self-conception and that ascribed to them by dominant culture (Du Bois 2005, pp. 20–21). Offering slightly different language, Lewis Gordon expounded Du Boisean double consciousness as the impossibility of dual “citizenship”, or the social recognition of belongingness to both the American nation, where “American” equals Whiteness, and the “Negro Nation” (as Du Bois called Black citizens in the 1930s) (Du Bois 1935), forged necessarily through the socioeconomic ramifications of slavery and racial exclusion (Gordon 2008, p. 77). Du Bois and Fanon spoke directly to the sociopolitical Othering of Black Americans through the lens of national citizenship, but we can also frame Du Bois’s conception of double consciousness more broadly as a status of membership within dual or multiple specific communities.

Quadroon’s characters act as visual coordinates through which Abrams embodies overlapping and competing cultural consciousnesses, resisting the fixity of sociopolitical interpellation forced upon the “split” sense of self and wrestling with the optics of social citizenship. Within the classic definition double consciousness, Quadroon is steeped in the dichotomy between Blackness and Witeness, from literal references to anti-miscegenation in the interludes of the performance to the more understated, sinister circumstances of Butch in the Kitchen’s hospitalization (if we read Jewishness as an assimilation into Whiteness, which I complicate below). Beyond the specifics of the color line, the societal refusal of mutual citizenship is thematic both within the individual personas in Quadroon and across characters: Dew Drop’s reminder of her outsider status as a Jewish American immigrant, for example, and Dee’s struggles to find her sense of self as she straddles the line between acceptance and rejection within several social circles.

Scholars in feminism, queer theory, and Jewish Studies have also compellingly adapted and expanded double consciousness to articulate other, often mutually dependent structures of oppression and barriers to belongingness based upon constructed categories of race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, and sexuality. This includes the predisposition of citizenship toward assimilation into hetero-patriarchal “Whiteness”. Works like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s writings on intersectionality add dimension to double consciousness’s awareness of self-identification and strategies for political advocacy through multilaterally focusing on race and gender and external and self-perceptions of Black womanhood (Cho et al. 2013, p. 787). More than a consideration of individual identity categories alongside one another, intersectionality as envisioned by Crenshaw et al. as “[conceived] of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by power dynamics”.

Several scholars engaged here, including Homi Bhabha, Jose Esteban Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam, have similarly explored the politics of multiple “citizenships” across the boundaries of identity categories as dictated by majority culture. There are fascinating parallels—but importantly, not equivalencies—between the racial triangulation of Blacks and that of American Jews. Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folk and What That Says About Race in America frames (arguably light-skinned, Euro-American Ashkenazi) Jewishness as “off-whiteness”, a fluctuating designation somewhere between Whiteness and Blackness under which Jews are subject to a kind of double-vision or “racial middleness”: “an experience of marginality vis-à-vis whiteness, and an experience of whiteness and belonging vis-à-vis blackness” (Brodkin 2000).7 Retooling Brodkin’s concept to that of “conditional whiteness” through the lens of intersectionality, David Schraub has further complicated the collapse of Jewishness into Whiteness by the dominant culture perpetuates conceptual stereotypes of Jews as a cadre of powerful “super-whites” taking advantage of the privileges of Whiteness, stratifying or negating both the existence of non-White Jews and the differentiated experiences and concerns of (White and non-White) Jews both within and outside of the Jewish community (Schraub 2019, pp. 380–82).

With Schraub in mind, consider Abrams’s Black, queer Jewishness (indeed, all conglomerations of identity categories) as “more than the sum of its parts” (Schraub 384)—not simply an additive process of teasing out the attributes of individual identity descriptors but acknowledging the ever-shifting relations between them and what their mutual attachments do to each other. How do we interpret each through the others, and in what ways does visual culture reinforce or subvert our interpretations?

In Abrams’s case, we might consider the interrelation of powerful constructions of Black and Jewish femininity and expectations of queer gender identity in both dominant culture and within these respective groups. How, for example, might common media conceptions of Jewishness favor Euro-Ashkenazi heterosexuality? In what ways have Black lesbians been denied representation within queer circles? How might identifying as a Black butch female uphold or trouble stereotypes of Black female masculinity? How might issues of class, race, and sexuality undermine Abrams’s visibility and mobility within and through all of the personal affiliations to which she asserts membership? Who, ultimately, has the authority to determine citizenship?

Abrams’s use of character “types” such as the Jewish mother and the Greek “hair girl” in Quadroon thus speaks to her adoption of easily recognizable traits that function as touchstones for her assimilation within specific groups; “Vision is far from neutral”, states Elahe Magdalena Yekani, “and the question of recognition often a matter of survival” (Yekani 2022, p. 92). Yet accepting one identity potentially comes at the expense of others. Dew Drop Lady, the personification of Abrams’s European Jewish immigrant grandmother, and the character of her Black grandmother, Janie Bell, represent mutually exclusive concepts of national and cultural citizenship. Dew Drop’s interpellation “as Jew” at Coney Island alludes to early 20th-century narratives of Jewishness as racial non-Whiteness and thus “un-Americanness”. However, it also raises the specter of Jewish paths to social citizenship in this period via popular visual media and the donning of blackface. Janie’s narrative evokes parallel social excision through the hardships of class and race that hindered survival in New York, symbolized by her physical separation from society on Welfare Island after developing tuberculosis, a disease more prominent in communities of color due to health and environmental disparities (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2024).

The mutually constitutive racialization of Blacks and Jews in the United States by the majority culture8 and the fraught relationship between the Black and Jewish communities continues to pit minority identities against each other to deflect from White culture’s grasp on the strings of social and political control. While we might conclude that overcoming political oppression through the lens of intersectionality is not the central concern of Quadroon, the work demands viewers consider the social oppression of multiple-times marginalized individuals as impacted by the entangled systems and visual codes of identity politics. Within the title of the work, the concept of a quadroon—an ascribed identity label that both affixes Blackness and denies whole association with either Blackness or Whiteness—positions Abrams’s body in the borderlands of several proscribed identities. This space outside The Real also makes possible their simultaneous existence.

5. Dee and the Problems of Passing

We first encounter Dee (Figure 4), Abrams’s self-portrait as a teenager attempting to pass as a boisterous, boy-crazy Greek young woman. Dee’s rapid-fire stories about her social group gradually unfurl her and Abrams’s deep-seated frustrations with her inability to physically and socially shed her Black and Jewish familial origins. As the scene materializes, the camera pans over an ostentatious white car with navy leather interior parked aside a residential street in Astoria, the “little Greece” of New York, zooming in on Dee sitting in the front passenger seat. The commanding presence of her sparkly attire and the boldness of her makeup project the self-confidence of youthful femininity and sex appeal. She wears a black sequin dress and striped tights; her teased dark curls graze large, sparkly disc-shaped silver earrings. She is heavily made up with rouge, thick eyeliner, and long red fingernails. Dee reveals that her true identity is obscured not only by the trappings of her dress, but by the inscrutable origins of her brown skin tone and her assumed, culturally ambiguous name, which she says led her friends to believe she is Greek.

Dee’s narrative and shifting camera angles expose the subtle discrepancies between Dee’s self-presentation—how she wants to be seen—and the anxieties of being “discovered” as an impostor. The camera flashes from Dee to her reflection in the side mirror as she gabs casually out of the open passenger window about her string of Greek American boyfriends, perhaps hinting at a prophetic self-awareness of the slippage of her façade. As she waits for Nikos, her latest flame, to emerge from his house, Dee points animatedly to pictures pulled from her purse of her “Dudesses”, her circle of Greek female friends. Her excited gossiping around the girls’ romantic exploits, from setups to double dates and plans for early marriage, indicate divergences between American Greek communal values and her own as she admits she prefers to wait until she finds the right man.

However, the diversion Dee’s idle chatter offered from her inner turmoil halts abruptly as the conversation circles back to her relegated social position in the car. Here, Dee’s mood darkens, and agitation is clear in her inflection and perplexed facial expressions. Her anecdote, concerning a dramatic and disturbing moment just a few moments ago when she tried to wave hello to Nikos’s mother through the front window of the house, confirms Dee’s failure to adequately “pass” as Greek and realizes Dee’s inner fear of rejection amongst her friends and their families:

I don’t know, but that lady in the window, one thing Nikos did tell me is something that she said about me, and I’m not even sure what she meant. I mean the lady never even met me, and what, she hates me? What Nikos told me that she said about me was that I was a Mavro, and in Greek, that means Black, and then she said I was a Christ Killer. Black Christ Killer? (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 3).

Despite Dee’s best efforts to assert herself within Greek American social circles, Nikos’ mother interpellates and divulges Dee’s “true” selves, and then dismisses her—literally, through the snap-closure of curtains, negating any semblance of acceptance. Dee’s encounter with Nikos’s mother highlights the intersectional challenges of passing, underscoring how racial and religious identities complicate her quest for acceptance.

Abrams’s presentation of Dee’s character deftly articulates the conscious self-awareness of the tender teenage years, procured through uneasy attempts at adopting Greek language, gestures, attire, and even cultural values around love, marriage, and gender roles. Her attempt to present visual signifiers of Blackness: dark curly hair, brown skin—as Greek; her adoption of the language, style, and cultural milestones of Greek immigrant life; her attempt to cover the fraught familial history of her multiraciality with sequins and heavy makeup; her conspicuous performance of heterosexuality, femininity, and cultural identity emphasize the artist’s desire yet inability to pass. Dee’s story also mirrors Abrams’s struggle to reconcile her parents’ insistence on the beauty and potential restorative power of her multiraciality with the realities, rejections, and impositions of dominant society as expressed through the delicate dance of teenage identity experimentation (artist statement for Quadroon, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 1).

Dee’s desire to pass is undermined by the simultaneous il/legibility of her physical difference and the harmful stereotypes of the Black and Jewish communities of her birth that automatically classify her as “Other”. Of the four personae, Dee is the most outwardly concerned with performing a well-received identity, the futility of which is only further emphasized by the character’s allusion to the racial ideologies and personal pathologies associated with the myth of the tragic mulatta (echoed in the live performance interlude between Dew Drop Lady and Butch in the Kitchen, discussed later in this piece). Yet, while Dee is unable to transform her body and transcend ethnoracial stereotypes, Blackness and Jewishness are allowed to coexist in their transgressiveness.

6. Kvelling and Kvetching: Dew Drop Lady and the American Jewish Mother

While Dee attempts to pass as non-Jewish, Dew Drop Lady (Figure 5) embodies the quintessential immigrant Jewish mother, using this stereotype to confront the pressures of assimilation and the desire for acceptance. As we will see, both Dew Drop Lady (DDL) and Janie Bell also mutually evoke existential anxieties around familial heritage and (non)assimilation into their Jewish and Black worlds, respectively, which, for Abrams, often manifested in the racial ambiguities of her hair texture, skin color, conventionally masculine style, and husky voice. The interlude between the characters of Dee, who opens Quadroon’s performance, and Dew Drop sets the stage for this dichotomy: donning Dew Drop’s head scarf and housecoat, she enacts a ritual symbolizing blood quantum law, in which she drops liquid into a chalice and announces her classification as quadroon. Following this “judgment”, Abrams-as-Dew Drop recounts feeling isolated from her cousins as she watched them cornrow her father Eddie’s hair at her aunt’s home, a skill her own father pointed out she did not possess. The story evokes a sense of guilt and confusion about her belongingness amongst her family members, a sense of detachment from specific cultural histories and practices that also permeates Abrams’s stylized portrayal of Dew Drop.

We meet DDL on a beach just outside Coney Island, once home to the Dew Drop parachute jump ride. In the video recording, Dew Drop’s reel opens with a black screen, the quintessential Fiddler on the Roof song “Tradition” becoming gradually audible. A female voice sings along with the character Golde, father Tevye’s wife, and the ensemble as they extol the Jewish “Mamas”’ womanly duties of running home and family; the blackness dissipates into panning shots of the sandy beach and a glimpse of a tall white Ferris wheel. The camera settles upon Dew Drop reading a Danielle Steele novel in her floral house dress, pink fuzzy slippers, and garish makeup, her hair in pink plastic curlers beneath a yellow schmata. Noticing us watching, she immediately strikes up a conversation.

Underlying Dew Drop’s exuberant prattling about her hair stylist, successful children, and her childhood as a Polish immigrant is the shadow of the Holocaust and the twinned promise and angst of being Jewish in a new home. As if gabbing with a new friend, she chirps at the camera in a thick New York Jewish accent about the origin of her namesake, sprinkling her story with Yiddish exclamations of “oy” and “mazel tov!” and “nachas” and punctuating her speech with exaggerated hand gestures. She describes the train rides her family would take as a young girl after immigrating to Brooklyn, a new version of the “old country”, a journey through dark tunnels and flashing lights until the train broke daylight in Coney Island’s sweet smells, sounds, and laughter. Remembering the proverbial light at the end of this tunnel, she explains:

…I would think to myself…THIS IS AMERICA! It was such a dream come true. So we’d get off the train and so much would be going on. All sorts of families with their children, young couples in love, clowns, tall men, fat ladies, men with two heads, girls that swallowed swords, everything you wanted. We’d get off that train and not one person cared who we were under all those lights. (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 2).

Coney Island functions symbolically here as a third space for both Dew Drop and Abrams that alludes to the immigrant experience and her search for open arms as a perceived outsider in multiple social groups. Abrams wrote in an undated artist statement that:

At the dilapidated amusement park, I am able to locate the artifacts that call upon my restoration. From beneath the inoperable Parachute Jump, I am reminded of my grandmother’s exuberance as she once described descending from the top. Peeking through a crack in the garage door of the carousel invites rewriting my father’s marriage proposal to my mother in the form of a brass ring…Coney Island is the America of my dreams, and it is through the diversity of it’s [sic] population that I am born. (Artist statement, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 1).

It is on Coney Island that Abrams figuratively and literally locates her family and connects with their histories, traversing time by harboring the specter of Dew Drop within her own body. However, DDL evokes both acknowledgment and a sense of detachment from the collective trauma of the Holocaust that anchors her grandmother’s personal immigrant experience and much of modern Jewish identity. She recounts an unsettling interaction with a ride operator who points out a “star” is missing from her ticket; Dew Drop, insinuating the man reminded her of soldiers from the old country and directly countering her celebration of Coney Island, proclaims, “I didn’t think I was in America anymore” (Danielle Abrams Papers).

Abrams’s theatrical, stereotypical portrayal of the elderly New York Jewish immigrant defuses the seriousness of Dew Drop’s brush with the danger of identification and her inability to “pass” as a non-Jew in the United States. Her readability depends on popular, gendered representations of the doting, hard-working Yiddishe Mama—protective, hopeful, assimilated-yet-unassimilable Jewish Mother, a symbol of the vanishing world of the Jewish past amidst American assimilation. Joyce Antler writes of the early 20th-century stereotype that “because they associated the Jewish mother with home, family, tradition and religion—the bodily representation of all that was familiar, loved, and therefore missed—Jewish artists and writers invested their ‘Yiddishe Mamas’ with extraordinary energy and sympathy, but often with an obsessive and confining control seen as necessary to the immigrant struggle for survival” (Antler 2007, p. 17). Where Dee seems to bodily reject the visible vestments of Blackness and Jewishness in an attempt at social acceptance, Dew Drop Lady’s brazenness, her childlike perception of antisemitism, and her Coney Island surroundings emphasize a sense of external social rejection. Abrams oscillates within these gaps between embodiment and ownership of identity, somewhere amidst performance and possession.

Read retrospectively through Abrams’s later work, the character of Dew Drop nods subtly to the contentious relationship between Black and Jewish Americans and their mutual status as outsiders, not simply within dominant society but intracommunally. In Dew Drop’s world, this manifests as the unmasking of latent racism and social distancing within the Jewish community through the banalities of everyday interactions. Abrams again dons her schmata as Dew Drop in her recorded public performance Early Bird (2004), letting her loose in the streets of Brighton Beach to blend amongst the local population of Jewish senior citizens on a bench outside a supermarket. Sporting a light blue dress and red cardigan, compression stockings, and oversized sunglasses, DDL clutches a large, embroidered handbag to her chest as she chats with her fellow bubbes and zaydes. She reads corny Jewish jokes off index cards to her compatriots, including one about a moyel carrying a “bris-ket”. The cringeworthy comedy is somewhat offset by the mundanity of their topics of conversation: marriage, family origins, pumpernickel brands—until a series of exchanges in which Abrams, merging herself with the character of her grandmother, reveals her Black and Jewish heritage. She asks Irving, a man on her left, “You don’t think Black and Jewish are the same?” “No”, responds Irving. When asked why not, Irving states, “You’re Jewish, you’re Jewish, you’re Black, you’re Black. I’m not a racist”. Abrams responds, “My mother is Jewish, but my Dad is Black. I’m Black and Jewish…My mother is Jewish, Jewish, it’s my religion. But my race I’m black”.

Juxtaposed with Irving is Abrams’s conversation with Sylvia, an elderly woman to Abrams’s right. Discussing her job as a young woman, Sylvia similarly avers her lack of prejudice as she describes the Blacks she used to work with as lazy. Leaning in, Abrams reveals that her mother is Jewish and her father is Black; later, Sylvia counsels Abrams/Dew Drop not to wait to meet someone, as her “features are beautiful”. “So were my father’s!” Abrams exclaims (Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 12). Both senior citizens fall quiet, appearing stymied by the duality of Abrams’s identification. Cobbled together, these bits and pieces of conversation belie a disconnect between the mutually exclusive, biometrically based systems of racialization (of Blackness and Jewishness) that have shaped American Black/Jewish interactions and their subsequent disorientation through Abrams’s physical presence. Implied in this slightly shifted manifestation of Dew Drop is the requirement to shed her Blackness in order to be seen as Jewish, a Jewishness that is loudly performative through the character of Dew Drop herself.

7. Janie Bell and the “Masking” of Identity

Janie Bell (Figure 6), a version of Abrams’s Southern Black grandmother who died of tuberculosis when she was six, is perhaps the most enigmatic of the four characters. Janie’s performance most directly engages with the circumstances of Abrams’s struggle with the dichotomy between her physiological appearance, relatively comfortable upbringing, and familial heritage. Perceived situationally as potentially “too Black” or “not Black enough”, Abrams’s personal files and journals often express anxieties over the authenticity of her identification with Blackness. In one journal entry, Abrams expresses a bevy of reasons she “is not Black”, from the possible privileges of her light skin and advanced degree to the necessities of her performance “as Black” amongst members of the Black community; in another, she recounts a conversation between herself and a dark-skinned man in a multiracial social support group she created, where she feared being viewed as performing Blackness like a “snake oil salesman” (Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 6, undated). She similarly described her experience teaching art to predominantly students of Black, Caribbean, and Latin descent at Erasmus Hall Education Campus in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for a project proposal to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artists in Residence program in 2001, particularly the dichotomy of her students’ interpellation of her as “White” and her instant “non-White” status amongst White social circles (“Notes for Abrams Letter”, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, 21 May 2001: 3).

While Janie’s story does not outwardly suggest Abrams’s struggles with self-perception, her character serves as a mirror for Abrams’s internal struggles with Black identity, exposing the complexities of claiming an authentic connection to a history marked by trauma and resilience. She stated of her undertaking of Janie:

Until making Quadroon, I was under the assumption that I could not set up shop in the body of a black character, because of my not-so-visibly black skin. I feared that my own performance of blackness would read as disingenuous and float adrift, lacking the anchor of skin color, hair texture, and social codifiers that have come to be associated with black identity. To perform in a black face, to provide visual evidence deeming my work, as well as my identity, genuine. This impossibility was [inaudible]; not just in the embodiment of my genetic grandmother, but more importantly, through the realization that Janie’s identity in Quadroon was interdependent upon the identities of Dee, Butch in the Kitchen, and Dew Drop Lady. Janie’s blackness moves in tandem with Jewishness, queerness, and my experience of gender and class…(artist speech for “Is Anything All Right?”, Danielle Abrams Papers, 2002).

The kinship Abrams suggests between the four personas points to the boundaries of their identities as mutually constituted via the intersection of experiences of marginalization, but also nods to the fear of a merely performative belongingness across all aspects of her identity that effectively renders acceptance inaccessible. As the representation of Abrams’s “claim” to Blackness, Janie’s character is central to interpreting Quadroon through the underlying, binary racial politics of the work’s title. In the live performance of Quadroon, for example, the interlude between BITK and Janie underlines Abrams’s internalized interpellation as not truly Black but “other than” even through the eyes of structuralized White racism. A performer recites what appear to be Louisiana’s legal definitions of various delineations of blood quantum—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, griff—the quoted passage asserting that belongingness to each category is both physiologically impassable and formulaically and visually distinguishable. The passage contradicts Abrams’s own experiences with epidermal identification and reinforces a spectrum of rigid boundaries between Blackness and Whiteness, effectively excluding her from claiming either.

Janie’s narrative delicately intimates the suppressions of race, class, and gender in her exchange of midcentury Southern Black female experience for the culture shock that is the hustle and bustle of New York City. We meet Janie seated on a park bench near a lake in a public park, the sounds of rustling trees and children playing tinkling in the background. Her bright salmon pink dress with scalloped hems glows like neon in the sunshine, her dark red lips shaping her lilting Southern drawl and her hair in glossy, tight curls. Her reserved gestures and demeanor mask the bittersweet tenor of her experiences in the Big Apple. Janie begins with the family trauma of her mother’s murder by her alcoholic husband via house fire in Ashland, Virginia, and her move to Harlem, New York to be near her seven brothers and sisters. The import of the fiber of the family bond is apparent throughout her tale. She fondly remembers family get-togethers in Flushing with her sister Margaret’s grandmother, “Mama”, with their mixture of “complexions from high yellow to coconut to almond joy” (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 11) and her placement of her youngest and eldest children with her siblings as a working woman in Harlem while keeping Abrams’s father, Eddie, in her care. When she is diagnosed with tuberculosis, Janie is moved to the infamous hospital complex on Welfare Island adjacent to New York. Janie fondly recalls how little Eddie’s visits and rides on the playground structures outside breathed life into her ailing body; back-shadowing her present conversation with viewers on the park bench, Janie details her last visit with Eddie at a park in Harlem—and thus past, present, and future converge on the bench as listeners now visit with Janie’s specter.

The recurrence of the word “spot” throughout Janie’s segment refers outwardly to her sickness, but also alludes to the traumatic and intergenerational memories Abrams inherits. Janie introduces the “spot” as a shifting signifier that connects generations early on in her narrative, sandwiched between the fire at her Ashland home and her move to New York before we learn of Janie’s diagnosis:

A spot

A spot on your lung

A spot that holds you in your babies’ minds (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 11).

This “spot” thus surfaces first as a possible reference to ash and smoke inhalation and to the less tangible pain of family destruction and separation from life and each other, which become embodied through Janie’s illness later in the story. The last few sentences of the performance layer the poignancy of future remembrance atop the pain of past loss and present suffering, tying the meaning of this “spot” as both a literal and figural black mark on the body to the continuance of Janie’s memory by Abrams’s father, Eddie:

And me and my Eddie, we said goodbye to each other

And I knew

I knew I’d always hold a spot in my babies’ minds (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 15).

Considering the spot as a “black/Black mark” also activates its symbolism of Blackness, and membership in the Black community, as a biological inheritance that connects its bearer to the sweeping American history of structural racist oppression. In performing Janie, Abrams becomes a medium for “meeting” her grandmother and connecting with the Black side of her family from which she often felt estranged. Engaging with Janie’s contribution to her family history and molding her appearance to elicit the image of her grandmother, Abrams taps into persistent, if essentialist, notions of Blackness; as Cherise Smith states in Enacting Others:

Knowledge and correct usage of the narratives and signs of blackness function as a passkey that admits or excludes individuals. Authentic blackness, for example, has been aligned variously with nostalgic notions of Southern plantation culture in the late nineteenth century; with Southern rural, poor folk culture in the first decades of the twentieth century; and, in the final decades of that century, with urban blight and poverty. Despite its shifting lines of definition, blackness continues to be associated with emotionality, the body, urban culture, the primitive, overt sexuality, poverty, and heterosexist masculinity (Smith 2011, p. 11).

At the end of the performance Abrams and Janie merge, uniting the distinctive cultural experiences of Blackness and Jewishness exemplified in Janie and Dew Drop as they perform a powerful and notably Jewish memorial ritual. Janie grabs a CD player and starts the music (in the recording, the song is Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone), sets the player on the chair where she has been sitting, places a rock from a nearby table on the chair, and exits through the audience at the back of the theater. The spot as a symbol, and indeed Janie as a whole, seems to externalize a multifaceted sense of distance between Abrams and a personal relationship with her grandmother, but also the more abstract gulf between her life as a light-skinned Jewish girl and the subtle conveyance of the adversity of Black American life in her grandmother’s story.

Janie’s role as the conclusion of the performance piece complicates the possibility of closure, particularly in Abrams’s later work where the “spot” as a biological marker of Blackness collides with her fear of her own Blackness as a masquerade. While Janie functions as a bridge to Abrams’s Black heritage, she is also a precursor to Abrams’s recurring representation of perceived discord between her self-image and her mirror image, her body a compression of tensions over the ability to assimilate, survive, and thrive. Abrams seemed particularly interested in the historical use of blackface by Jewish performers in the United States and the grotesque appropriation of Black stereotypes in early 20th-century vaudeville and Hollywood as a means of asserting Jewish American citizenship and proximity to Whiteness by, essentially, ostracizing Blackness.9 For example, Abrams’s Routine (2008) directly invokes and intertwines the politics of minstrelsy and racial passing/crossing as especially thorny for multiple minority identities and bodies like hers. Donning a tuxedo and impersonating a brassy Borscht Belt Jewish comedian, Routine invokes the specters of performers like Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson, for whom fame rested at least partly upon their adoption of blackface. Present throughout the set is a tub of borscht, into which Abrams periodically shocks the audience by dunking her face, and eventually her whole body, into the soup. The comedian’s sexist and homophobic jokes clash with Abrams’s own identity, underscoring the farcical nature of the piece and referencing Abrams’s multiple, contentious layers of masking both in character and out. She once stated of Routine’s comedic act:

I asked myself if the image of a Jew in blackface was a bizarre parody of my own self-portrait? [emphasis mine]… The penetrating stain of the beet-based soup could be understood in many ways—as the embarrassment of this Jewish legacy or as a kind of bloodletting or cleansing—a mikvah. My intention was to review and resignify the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century blackface mask—one that paradoxically functioned as a Jewish portal to assimilation and whiteness (Coon 2018).

Compared to Routine, Abrams’s interrogation of her performance of Janie Bell as a form of blackface feels downright subtle. However, her comment about Janie’s authentic Blackness as reliant upon her juxtaposition with the other three personae similarly conveys a “parodic self-portrait” of oppositional, yet coexistent race and gender relations through which Abrams as a queer, multiracial American Jew must learn to situate themselves. As half-real/half-fiction, we might see the characters in Quadroon as cultural “masks” grounded in the familial and the fantastical rendered legible through exaggeration and stereotype and, as they chatter over one another in the video, permitting Abrams to cross between and even inhabit multiple personae simultaneously. Janie’s “authentic” Blackness thus becomes so in relation to her difference from the other personae and from Abrams’s emphasis on specific physical and performative traits: the natural curl of her dark and textured hair, the juxtaposition of her bright pink dress and brown skin, the deep, slow Southern drawl, and the elements of Janie’s story.

8. Butch in the Kitchen

Like Dew Drop and Janie, Butch in the Kitchen’s (Figure 7) narrative conveys a melancholic longing for emotional connection to her Black and Jewish heritages and the frustration caused by perceptions of irreconcilable binarism, a communal and societal pressure to conform to one group or the other. However, juxtaposing BIK’s gender ambiguity with three strongly typified heterosexual female characters—Janie and Dew Drop’s easily identifiable Black and Jewish womanhood, and Dee’s purely performative adoption of Greek femininity—emphasizes the possibilities of butchness as a template for transcending the limitations of socially imposed identity categories. Through Butch in the Kitchen, Abrams not only performs but interrogates the performative nature of gender, blending elements of masculinity and femininity in a way that disrupts conventional binaries and calls into question the siloing of identities within the social order.

Butch’s scene opens in her kitchen with the sensual, dulcet tones of Barry White’s What Am I Gonna Do With You. Butch sings and sways to the music while shaking a plastic bag full of chicken. She wears a white tank top that reveals her arm tattoos, a heavy chain necklace, and a black hat that obscures her short curls. Noticing us, BIK turns down the radio and turns up the personality. Standing over a popping skillet, through a thick New York accent, Butch describes her father making fried chicken before beckoning the spectator to sit down; the camera pans lower as she, and presumably we, are seated. “Here in my kitchen”, she says excitedly, “we’ll learn about each other”. Ladling chicken soup into a bowl, she animatedly recalls her friends’ concern for her self-isolation and their recommendation of a doctor’s visit. BIK visits the doctor, only to be sent to a hospital after she tells the doctor how she likes to cook her chicken: “I like to fry it up…or I like to put it in a soup” (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 7).

At this point, the undercurrents of conflict between Blackness and Jewishness, concealment and openness, acceptance and rejection surface. While Butch does not specify the type of hospital to which she has been admitted, the undertones of her story indicate that she has been sent to a mental institution to treat her presumably “disordered” identity. She states that the hospital tried to sort her into one social place or another “…to put us into one group, or another group, to have a conversation. Hey, well maybe if they sat us down at a dinner table, or to a good poker game we might have talked”. Asking a nurse why the doctor committed her, she is told “a ‘convergence of stresses’ and a ‘clinical depression’”. “What’d he think?” she muses. “There was only one way to cook a chicken?” (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 7). She explains that her release hinged on shutting herself down and stifling any mention of cooking altogether.

Butch’s face brightens as she shifts to her move to San Francisco, where she started her meal plan service for the local queer community with the help of food stamps. She recounts the many questions the social worker asked at her qualification meeting, especially when she again blurted out her preferred cooking methods of frying and soup-making. In this situation, however, the social worker smiles widely and immediately approves her for food stamps. Butch’s segment concludes with an outline of the food program and an invitation to return to the table to share stories and a meal.

In the performance script, the interlude between Dew Drop and BIK references two popular culture sources on the mixed-race subject and the concept of passing that prefigure BIK’s rejection from society as a multiracial, multicultural subject. After changing out of Dew Drop’s housecoat to slacks and a white undershirt, Abrams quotes from the first work of anti-slavery fiction about a mixed-race slave, Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore (originally published 1836), specifically a passage where Moore romanticizes his Black mother’s beauty despite her connection to an “ignoble and degraded race” (Hildreth 1852, p. 8). Switching gears, BIK recalls a family discussion about Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, a 1959 American film about a long-term companionship between two single mothers (Lora Meredith, who is White, and Annie Johnson, who is Black) and their daughters, alluding to Annie’s light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane’s ultimately unsuccessful rejection of her Blackness—and her mother, as its source—as she attempts to pass as White. Quoting her Aunt, Abrams-as-BIK states, “‘People used to tell me to try to pass, but I wasn’t having it. That’s what people used to try to tell you to do in those days, but I didn’t want nothing to do with it. I ain’t having it” (Quadroon performance script, Danielle Abrams Papers, Box 1, undated: 6). This transition between characters powerfully suggests both the historical fact of passing as a survival strategy and the performance of passing as presented in (White, dominant) culture: as a form of “trespassing” across systemic political boundaries of race and class perpetrated by the multiracial subject via the adoption of the (fabricated) “essential” appearances and behaviors of socially privileged groups (Ginsberg 1996, p. 3).

Dew Drop and Janie’s performances evoke the history and practices of passing for Black or Jewish through embodying overtly stereotypical and feminine character types within these respective communities. Utilizing Julia Charles’ notion of crossing as a form of negotiating self-subjectivity sans the racist connotations of passing, I argue BIK seeks not to pass but to cross—to subvert ethnoracial and gendered boundaries freely and authentically:

Where [the term passing] ultimately fails or is, at best, inadequate, I offer the term crossing, which is mostly shorthand for the strategy of temporary racial or gender crossing….Passing and crossing each rely on two things: the absence of reliable evidence of difference (i.e., racially indeterminate bodies) and the construction of essentialist identities, which ultimately determine the performer’s (in) visibility in particular racialized spaces (i.e., being successfully viewed as White in a White space, Black in a Black space, biracial in a hybrid space, or White in any space). While both passing and crossing require contact between the performer(s) and the audience, there is a distinctive difference in the two terms; the difference lies in deception (Charles 2020, p. 36).

For Charles, the multiracial subject’s act of crossing between imposed boundaries of Blackness and Whiteness exposes and exploits the artificial essentiality of race, citizenship, and group identities via the manifestation of a transitional and permeable psychic space called “That Middle World” through the activation of multiple “readable” identities (Charles 2020, pp. 23–24). In That Middle World, performance does not critique an individual’s deception of belongingness to sociopolitical categories but the deception of essentialism as natural.

Charles’ conception echoes both Homi Bhabha’s theory of Third Spaces as collisions of spheres of cultural difference in which hybrid identities are negotiated and José Esteban Muñoz’s act of disidentification as a practice of multiply marginalized subjects that overturns constructions of a fixed identity by shuttling back and forth between these spheres. Bhabha characterizes Third Spaces as encounters or collisions of spheres of cultural difference (articulated in The Location of Culture primarily through subjects of post-colonial nations) through which hybrid cultural identities are negotiated. More than the “sum of the ‘parts’ of difference” (Bhabha 1994, p. 2), the work of the Third Space, through the multicultural subject, lies in the resignification of proclaimed characteristics of authentic belongingness/Otherness, a porous overlapping of borders in which identity is consistently in a state of becoming. Disidentification, Muñoz argues, is a strategy of identity performance employed by individuals affiliated with multiple marginalized groups, a method of survival and subversion against dominant cultural ideologies that “[punish] the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (Muñoz 1999, p. 24). Neither fully accepting nor rejecting oppressive sociopolitical expectations of specific identity categories (of, for example, gender, sex, race, and religion), Muñoz asserts that multiply marginalized individuals navigate the discord between one’s sense of self and socially encoded narratives of identification through “[using] this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality” (Muñoz 1999, p. 72), exposing the constructed nature of the tenets of group belongingness and making space for themselves through the redefinition of identity labels. In Muñoz’s view, hybridity, exemplified in Abrams’s queer multiraciality, destabilizes the normativity of consistent, orderly identities by powerfully refusing to occupy only one space at a time, shuttling back and forth between and ultimately “wear[ing] down the coherency of borders” (Muñoz 1999, p. 74).

Through the lens of Charles, Bhabha, and Muñoz, we can view BIK’s kitchen and the racial and gendered ambiguities of BIK’s body as spaces of “crossing” in which the limits of Blackness, Jewishness, and queerness overlap like the cacophony of the characters’ voices in the installation, negating the assumption of a static or monolithic identity. By welcoming us into her home, Butch breaches the boundaries of public and private space, with her dining table a site of negotiation between individual self-formation and the communal politics of identities. Furthermore, the kitchen becomes a symbolic hearthstone for both Black and Jewish cultural rituals, celebrations, and family bonding, as well as a potential lab for cross-cultural fusion. For BIK, the act of preparing food connotes the suturing of deeply meaningful, if often adversarial, familial and cultural affiliations, subverting her existence deemed socially pathological. Chicken becomes a proxy for Abrams herself as an easily recognizable but culturally itinerant body and flesh that morphs across culinary borders while maintaining its core integrity as a recognizable form. Butch’s meal plan service extends this multiplicity to literally nourish her queer community. Through BIK, Abrams materializes the desire for dialogue and cohesion between her “selves” and acceptance amongst those around her by inviting the spectator into this liminal, utopic space.

9. Unambiguously Butch

With Dew Drop and Janie’s narratives in mind, the first portion of Abrams’s quote, “I know myself through my oppressor”, might be interpreted as a battle for defining subjectivity between individual self-assertion and societal ideologies that essentialize ethno-racial systems and ostracize “race hybridity”. How, though, might we consider the “resolution” of the Otherness of multiraciality, at least according to Abrams, through the opacity of gender presented through the character Butch in the Kitchen? The order in which the personae appear in the live performance: first Dee, then Dew Drop, Butch, and finally Janie—does not outwardly stage BIK as a solution to the problems of passing with which the other three characters grapple. However, Butch’s unique awareness of these difficulties and her attempts to counteract social limitations on the intersectionality of identities as symbolized by the mental hospital position her character and butchness writ large as a space of multiply “being”, if ultimately only fictionally.

We can, of course, ground BIK’s performance of butchness within Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity (and, by extension, of masculinity and femininity) as drag: as a retroactive cultural construction of biological gender from which there is no authentic original cluster of characteristics, and which is thus donned, reinforced, and subverted through iterative acts such as speech and behavior (Butler 1991, p. 21). Consistent with the notion of butchness set forth by scholars like Gayle Rubin and Jack Halberstam, BIK’s identification as butch (and Abrams’s as queer) resists binary conceptions of gender and racial identity via biologically detached masculinity and reclaims illegibility as a necessary state for the active formation of a durational subjectivity. Like the terms “masculine” and “feminine”, “butch” and “femme” have historically functioned in the lesbian community as sets of behavioral codes that orient members within specific social roles. Butchness has been commonly defined as “a category of lesbian gender that is constituted through the deployment and manipulation of masculine gender codes and symbols” (Rubin 2012, p. 242). Countering the seemingly simple adaptation of a heteronormative binary gender system within the lesbian community, Rubins argues that butchness as an identity category upsets the male/female binary and proves the contingency of masculinity as inflected by the various expectations of race, class, religion, nationality, occupation, and individual preference (Rubin 2012, p. 245). In Female Masculinity (2018), Halberstam extends Rubin’s discussion of masculinity, noting that the structure of conventional masculinity is decipherable primarily in its repetitions outside of the White, male bourgeois body (Halberstam 2018, p. 2). Furthermore, Halberstam asserts that masculinities are mutually constructed and performed by those with both biologically categorized male and female bodies; masculinity, then, consequently decouples associations between sexual organs and sexual and social roles and activities. Butchness is thus an inconstant state that detaches conventional expectations of gendered behavior from (a biologically) male or female body without rendering that body pathological. BIK’s attire and demeanor place her as normatively butch, but the visual cues we read as masculine (if we follow Halberstam) do not lead us to read her as trespassing upon masculinity; alongside these blurred boundaries of gender, we might see Abrams’s performance of Blackness and Jewishness in the work as her attempt to locate, make strange, and transcend heavily entrenched and mutually exclusive ideas of authentic Blackness and Jewishness. Relying on stereotyping the other characters in Quadroon to “label” their identities according to representational conventions, BIK represents the possibilities of simultaneously inhabiting multiple subject positions.

Furthermore, Butch offers us the potential of extending Butler’s constructivist approach to gender, so often tied to physiology, to other cultural categories and to the inconstancy of identities themselves. If rigid notions of essential Jewishness and Blackness are performative then, like the chicken, why cannot her body itself be a canvas for the shifting multitudes of her self-perception? Though a majority of Butler’s scholarship is attuned to gender and sexuality, they, like Crenshaw, Schraub, and others, have acknowledged race as a similar but distinct regulatory system reinforced by performativity (Butler 2011). Though analogies between the hardships of marginalized race and gender identities are sticky and potentially reductive, it can be helpful to consider that race, like gender, is also currently understood as a culturally produced cluster of essentializing traits intended to maintain established hierarchies of power and access through the reinforcement of “natural” biological difference. Moreover, constructs of gender, race, and sexuality do not exist solely on parallel planes. Karen Maeda Allman writes that while the separation of gender from sex in progressive politics has freed womanhood from the confines of biology, sexuality, race, and gender, they are nonetheless deeply intertwined as constructs of fixed, natural states. Feminine ideals, for example, are based upon a White, Euro-American complex of virtues, which include expectations of markedly heterosexual female sexual roles in contrast with the hypersexualization of Blacks. Butchness, then, particularly Black butchness, potentially rewrites several symbolic codes of belongingness simultaneously:

…Race, gender, and sexuality exist as a sort of unstable triad; shifts in one create disturbances in the other two. Transgressing racial boundaries, therefore, would not only potentially destabilize notions of racial purity but also threaten exposure of the racialized, historicized character of gender roles. Proscriptions against “race mixing” often coexist with calls for adherence to “traditional” gender roles and an emphasis on heterosexual, procreative sex only within the institution of marriage (Allman 1995, p. 279).

I do not claim to know with certainty what Abrams meant by her quote. Neither am I thoroughly convinced that gender ambiguities—which, as Halberstam writes, tend to both reify the binary system through differentiation from and relegate butchness to a type of “thirdness” or deviance (Halberstam, p. 20)—or the black/White color line as social symbolic orders are fully dissoluble. Furthermore, as Samiya A. Bashir notes in “Fear of a Lesbian Planet: Why Black Women Feel More Excluded Now from Lesbian Community Than Ever Before”, the image and activism of the lesbian community are typically built around affluent White women to the exclusion of aforementioned issues such as race, class, and religion that compound the social acceptance and perceptions of lesbian identities. “My butch identity is not just about sexuality or even a choice of gender”, Abrams asserts in Bashir’s piece, “it’s about wearing my working-class stripes and wearing my racial stripes” (Bashir 2001, p. 22). However, it is BIK who enables Janie and Dew Drop to “converse”, and all four characters are needed to complete both the work and Abrams’s autohistory. Butch potentially provides a masculine counterpoint to the three disparate but traditionally feminine personas. Thus, Abrams’s ability to embody all four proves the dual possibilities of detachment from, and authentic habitation of, several sets of gendered and cultural traits in a single body. Perhaps we can take Abrams’s expression of gender hybridity through Butch’s performance as a resolution of the “problem” of racial hybridity, not as an erasure of her specific identifications with Blackness or (White) Jewishness but as creating an interstitial dimension wherein, like the many iterations of butchness that confound binaries of masculinity and femininity, she maintains bodily autonomy and authority over her authenticity through the medium of performance. Quadroon thus offers a powerful blueprint for how performance art can be used to navigate and challenge the complexities of intersectional identity, urging us to reconsider the very definitions of authenticity and belonging.