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

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 Pairing video recordings of each character with interludes from an unpublished performance script, I consider the anxieties of passing expressed in the personas of Dew Drop and Janie Bell, and through the lens of Abrams’s diaries, pose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.