Outsider/Insider

February on Audiovisual Cultures Podcast featured episodes delving into dual outsider/insider identities, firstly in discussing Gael García Bernal's returned-from-exile character René Saavedra in No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012), and secondly in my conversation with Irish-American performing artist Shea Donovan, linked here:

It is an identity I have had to come to embrace in myself, albeit to a more localised extent than a Chilean exile raised in Mexico because of a military dictatorship or a recent descendant of Irish émigrés to the United States now living in London. For me, it's grappling with the outsider identity that has fallen on me after having to leave Belfast for Britain to get work - I am no longer of my home city, and not out of choice. Pre-pandemic, I enjoyed a sense of inside-ness while outside in finding a broadly Irish community here in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in Brexit Britain I embraced the defined-only-as-other-to-the-English Irish identity projected upon me because of how I sound. However, while I hold both Irish and British passports, it feels fraudulent for me to lay any claim to being Irish. 

While unable to go home (enough people have asked me could I not get a job where I come from to never encourage me to consider England as home), I maintain a connection to the island by learning the language (the Ulster dialect as much as possible), and therein grappling with the imposter syndrome that comes with being someone learning it from scratch as an adult rather than someone revisiting it from school, and all the implications of what that means in the specific context. It has taken a while for protestant/unionist-backgrounded folk to feel permitted to embrace a language we aren't supposed to want to speak as our own, and yet it is. Apart from anything, languages should belong to those who can and want to practice them, and gatekeepers be damned.

Converse to my Irishness, my Britishness is an oddity the people of Britain seem never to grasp no matter how often it is explained. I gave up doing this, I think after the EU referendum in 2016, but for my first couple of years in England when I was told I was Irish I would explain that actually I'm from a part of Belfast that couldn't be any more British. In fact, I emerged amidst a fetishism for Britishness so fevered, most English folk wouldn't recognise it. So once again, I am an insider while an outsider.

Linked with the British working-class upbringing, I am also an outsider in the arts, and education in general to an extent. My educational achievements have allotted me some social mobility and I feel the jarring reality of living a middle-class life now with a head full of memories of struggling and lurching in the past, which I'd likely be doing again now if not for my partner. 

Perhaps it is obvious to say there are clear links here with imposter syndrome. From chatting with Andrew in the throes of marking and, coincidentally, a discussion on a recent Kermode & Mayo's Film Review Show involving Paris is Burning (dir. Jennie Livingstone, 1990) and Ru Paul's Drag Race, I've been put in mind more of the people not quite in and not quite outside of the drag communities in these texts. Part of the interest in reading around Paris is Burning lies in considering the gaze of a white lesbian on the predominantly black/Afro-Caribbean/African-American/Afro-Latinx players in the New York drag ball scene in the 1990 documentary. During LGBT+ History Month, recalling Paris is Burning serves an important reminder that categories of human identity are not homogenous. 

Also in mind is how Jameela Jamil was treated last year for taking a hosting role on Legendary, a show with a more direct lineage from the underground drag balls. As I recall, Jamil was trashed by the community she was trying to serve and was told she was not a part of even though she felt she was. It was a further reminder that not everyone who might feel they belong somewhere on a queer spectrum has come out as such, and there is so often a disconnect between the identities we feel we have in ourselves and those imposed upon us by others from our surface presentation. Psychologically, this makes things awkward at best, and deadly at worst. It can put us war within ourselves, and finding self-awareness and confidence through that is easier said than done.