Political Cartooning, Queering, and Hamilton

I’ve been pondering over a couple different examples of “queering” performative utterances, but I think I’ve decided on two to discuss on this platform. Indeed, the alternating of political or historical images seem to be a very common choice around the internet, and actually I’m wondering if political cartoons and political satire could be considered “queering” of performative utterances. I don’t think satire uniformly fits under this umbrella, but consider, for example, this political cartoon from last week: 

The image contains several performative acts, from Trump performing Nazi salute to Hitler using the speech act “You’re hired.” When it comes to queering of a performative utterance, the fact that the president of the United States, an office and entity that has 80 years of ostensibly standing against National Socialism and autocracy and 243 years of standing for democracy, is throwing the salute of a fascist seems like a deliberate satirical attempt at playing off expected behavior.

         Another example I considered is the musical Hamilton. Hamilton takes the racial expectations of a play about the American revolution and turns them on their head, casting people of color in roles that were originally filled by white people. The result is a sort of “coloring in” of a previously white-washed historical narrative. The music of the time period was entirely orchestral, but the creative team for Hamilton filled the play with rap, hip hop, R&B, and other music traditionally created by artists of color. All of this serves to queer the final result away from our expectations.

         Not only that, but I feel like it’s important to note that both of these examples have positive end results, connotations, and/or effects. I suppose that the term “positive” is highly subjective, but I think the critical and financial success of Hamilton, and the ongoing popularity of political cartooning speak to the way our culture values them at large. To me, this shows “queering” in a very positive light. Historically, given the negative and homophobic associations with the word queer, I would guess that those outside the academic community probably are still overcoming these negative connotations associated with that word, but every example that I have seen on our class’ blogs have shown this in a positive way.  That may seem like a “duh” statement to us as a group, or maybe not even relevant, but it seems important to continue to note positive things given the renewed popular rise of fascism and bigotry around the world.