Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2024, softcover, 280 pages, 21.8 x 27.6 cm

In Vaginal Davis' pioneering and incredibly diverse oeuvre, punk meets glamour, queer activism meets racial justice and resistance meets joy. An icon of contemporary queer history, Vaginal Davis has made scenes for a living: through personas as diverse and outrageous as Rayvn Cymone McFarlane or John Dean Egg III, and as a part of bands including Cholita! The Female Menudo and the Afro Sisters. Since then, she has achieved cult status as a self-proclaimed "sexual repulsive" and a "drag terrorist"--shattering notions of mainstream conformity and the sanitization of Black, queer and Chicano cultures for appropriation by white audiences.
An uproarious celebration of Davis' work and cultural legacy, this bilingual English/Swedish catalog is Z-bound (English on one side, Swedish on the other) and takes readers on a whirlwind tour across the artist's protean output spanning music, performance, installations, lectures and visual art: from her early punk shows to her recent "fantasy library" imagined as a teenager's bedroom. A final section, "Dear Ms. Davis," includes heartfelt tributes to the artist from fellow "colleagues, concubines and conconspirators."
Vaginal Davis was born intersex in Los Angeles to parents of Black Creole, Mexican, Jewish and German descent. Naming herself after radical Black feminist Angela Davis, she emerged in the queer punk scenes of Bushwick and Los Angeles in the 1980s before moving to Berlin in the early 2000s.