BALLAD OF THE QUEER MUMMER

Ballad Of The Queer Mummer is an exhibition consisting of photographic diptychs, crocheted costumes, and video works centring around my alter-ego, The Queer Mummer. The Queer Mummer blends the traditional Newfoundland practice of mummering with the queer art of drag in order to deconstruct homophobic, heterosexist, and essentialist attitudes that are still very much prevalent in Western society.

Mummering is the Christmas tradition of dressing in homemade disguises and going door-to-door to perform for neighbours, whose job is to guess which members from the community are dressed who is dressed as mummers. Mummering, like drag, involves cross-dressing, as stated in the popular Newfoundland song “Any Mummers Allowed In? (The Mummer’s Song)” by Simani:

Ah, there's big ones and small ones, tall ones and thin,

 There's boys dressed as women and girls dressed as men,

 With humps on their backs and mitts on their feet,

 My blessed we'll die with the heat.

Ballad Of The Queer Mummer centres around six mummer personas created between 2018 and 2023: Pearly Curly, Tipsy Magoo, Boggy Woggy, Bae Fae, Strippy Tease, and The Janny. The outfits of the mummers are mainly constructed meticulously through crochet, a handmade textile process that cannot be replicated by machine. Many of the outfits were created for live performances that were performed in 2019 prior to the pandemic. The outfits take inspiration from Newfoundland folklore (fairies and swamp monsters), queer icons, and historic and modern mummering.

By blending drag and mummering, The Queer Mummer demonstrates that mummering is, itself a queer performance practice. In fact, The Queer Mummer itself is tautology: as the original definition of ‘queer’ means strange and mummers are people dressed as strangers, therefore all mummers are queer. Both drag and mummering are tools for the multi-vocal expression of identity, and both blur and subvert the gender binary. Therefore, both drag and mummering queer public space in one way or another and give license to possibilities beyond the two sex, two gender system; offering concrete reconfigurations of gender and gender performance.