Zak or Zackie

Zak or Zackie

“Gender is always doing” Judith Butler
Zak is 32 years old, a drag queen, gay and HIV positive. He constantly balances between the introverted, lonely and quiet figure of Zak and the larger than life, heretical, and ultra sexed personality of Zachie oh. Zachie is not just a constructed artistic person or a fictional idol. It is the mirror counterpart of Zak, a complementary version of self that reconstructs the ruptured totality of his subjectivity and transcends the contradiction of gender by annulling its dualism. Zak belongs to the dynamic category of men that refuse to be categorized on the basis of deeply rooted representations of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. He/She self-defines as neither boy nor girl. He/She thinks of gender as quest, choice and in the end praxis,
This is the way that queer theory, one of the biggest epistemological breaks of our time, slips out of the terrain of academic thinking towards lived reality. The hardest category of meaning, the most rigid pylon of modernism that grounded the total domination of heteronormativity has been shaking under a polymorphous contestation. More and more persons, especially youths, cannot abide to traditional gender dichotomies and want to annul them, tracing new typologies of existence and undermining the embedded prudery and social norms. In this sense, gender trouble is a deeply inner and personal gesture that takes place in the most untouched points of subjectivity, but, at the same time, it is also a political comment on the determining dynamic of desire in the constitution of social life

text by Maria Louka