A Peculiar People - Mormonism, Drag Performance, and Erotic Non-Belonging at the Intersection of a Psychoanalyst’s Werk and Identity

Tensions between the secular (e.g. psychology, psychoanalysis, social work) and the religious (e.g. Mormonism) are brought into creative conversation with drag performance throughout this text. Drawing on a decade-long analytic treatment with a patient named Easton, the author traces how belief, depersonalization, and religious residue emerge in the transference and countertransference. Situating drag in Freud’s conceptualizations of “the uncanny,” and Laplanche’s notions of temporality (après-coup), the author suggests through personal narrative, case reverie, dream sequences, and drag embodiment – that an erotic charge of these repressive hauntings is in the dance between normativity and non-belonging. Intersecting Mormon cultural inheritance, psychoanalysis and queer identity, the author parallels the drag stage with the analytic relationship. Drag is explored not only as performance but praxis: a reaction formation of God, a queer exorcism of compulsive normativity and a vehicle for generative eroticism.