Vaginal Davis

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Vaginal Davis is a punk rock drag queen and an avant-garde performance artist. She has performed with such artists as Lisa Crystal Carver, Margaret Cho, and Beck, and has collaborated with underground photographers/film makers Bruce LaBruce, Rick Castro, and with the performance artist Ron Athey. She has more recently collaborated with the "Cheap" collective in Berlin, Germany. Davis's name is an homage to the radical black feminist Angela Davis. Journalist and musician Craig Lee bestowed the middle name Creme, but Davis prefers that people not use the name Vaginal Creme Davis.

Davis has a noteworthy musical career, and is associated with the formation of the queercore movement. One of her first bands was Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), co-founded with Glen Meadmore, who recorded their first single for independent record label Amoeba Records. PME went on to record the CD The White To Be Angry with producer Steve Albini. Davis is also a founding member of Cholita with Alice Bag (of seminal 1970s punk band The Bags). Davis and Bags also worked together in The Afro Sisters. More recently, as a part of her collaboration with the Cheap experimental theater collective in Berlin, Davis formed a punk band called Ruth Fischer (Fischer was a leader in the German Communist Party).

In her home town of Los Angeles, Davis is also known for hosting Club Sucker (1994-1999), and Bricktops (2003-2005) - the latter was inspired by Bricktop, one of the more fascinating figures of the 1920s and 1930s.

Davis has authored a number of underground films, including The White to Be Angry (1999), Designy Living (1994) and Three Faces of Women (1994), and appears in queer underground video classics such as Super 8 1/2 (Bruce LaBruce, 1994) and Hustler White (Bruce LaBruce and Rick Castro, 1998) and de:Rosa von Praunheim's Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please? (1999).

Vaginal Davis is the editor of the noted zines Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine and Shrimp. Aside from her own zines, her writing (somewhere between casual philosophy and gossip) has appeared in many publications, including Glue (in which she had a gossip column) and the LA Weekly. One of her stories was anthologized in The Best American Erotica of 2003, edited by Susie Bright.

She has recently claimed that Condoleezza Rice is her first cousin

External links

• Vaginal Davis Official Site
• Vaginal Davis at Internet Movie Database
• The Cholita! Page
• The Cholita! Family Tree, compiled by Ms. Davis

Sources

José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) ISBN 0816630151

Jennifer Doyle, "The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis" in Gavin Butt ed., After Criticism: New Approaches to Contemporary Art (New York: Blackwell, 2005), 81-100. ISBN 0631232842