Living deliciously with drag queen Pichi Keane
“I feel like I’m on a call with my therapist,” I joked over Zoom. I was met with the infectious laughter of Pichi Keane, the award-winning drag queen from South Africa (and now my unofficial drag counselor). “A lot of people say that after the show as well,” they replied. Pichi is coming to Manila next week to perform her one-woman drag cabaret “Freshly Squeezed.”
So far on Zoom, we’ve spoken about feeling like we’ve “failed” femininity, growing up as women, and our relationship with our bodies. Pichi, who is genderqueer and assigned female at birth, talks (and sings) about these and more in “Freshly Squeezed.” She uses drag and performance art to help people think twice about what they’ve gotten used to—something drag did for her.
We sat down with Pichi ahead of her show and talked about living our biggest, juiciest, most delicious lives, even in a world that thrives on putting us down.
YOUNG STAR: How did you get started with drag?
PICHI KEANE: I started in 2019 after a drag incubator program by DragJam in Hong Kong. I’m back in South Africa now and I’m still doing drag, because it was such a beautiful and validating experience. At the time, I was quite set on the fact that you’re born a woman, so you must be the best woman you can be. At the same time, I was questioning whether I was queer enough to be a drag queen.
Drag has actually been such a beautiful channel for me to explore my gender identity, so now I identify as genderqueer. I was able to do that by creating a contrast: In drag, with the wig, makeup, heels and costume, femininity, in its performance, felt comfortable. I realized that femininity has always been a performance for me; it’s not something I naturally am or what I prefer to identify as.
I like that you said how femininity always felt like a performance, because that’s something I’ve been trying to articulate as well. I called it being an “aspirational she/her.” This started when I gained weight over the pandemic, and I always thought of femininity as being tiny and delicate. I was like, “Am I really a woman if I’m larger?” What was it about drag that made you realize it can be an avenue for you to explore who you are?
The patriarchal idea of a woman is that she must be small, obedient, and quiet, and I think—you can print this—that’s bullsh*t.
Pichi Keane will perform her one-woman show ‘Freshly Squeezed’ for one night only this Nov. 26 at Sari Sari, Makati.
Being regarded as a plus-size person, it’s been a challenge getting onstage and going, “Look how glorious, gorgeous, and sexy I am.” Pichi is a way for me to access that because she’s so full of herself and it rubs off on me as well.
And there are so many ways to be feminine, to be a woman. We need to think beyond the binary. Men can be sensitive; women can be strong. It’s about allowing ourselves to be open and curious about what else we can be. What else can I embody, can I be big and sexy? Of course you can.
I say in “Freshly Squeezed” that there is money to be made from insecure little girls who are unsure of themselves. The world preys on our insecurities, and the more you decide that you love yourself—that you’re going to live your biggest, juiciest, most delicious life, the more we can work together towards breaking out of the system that is not positive for any of us.
How did you decide that body positivity and pleasure activism are things you wanted to focus on?
The women in my family have struggled with disordered eating. My grandmother would sneak sweets and then be very critical about our bodies. My sister and I had to do ballet and sports. That sunk into my psyche as a child, that to be worthy of love, I had to look a certain way. But my body just doesn’t work that way.
I think a lot of it came from body dysphoria, and it’s something I’m still working on. It’s about accepting yourself as you are, and not allowing the (mainstream) narrative (to affect you). Because the trend now is being super skinny again, but your body is not a trend. Your body is your home. You have to live in there, and you need to look after your future self. It’s so important for us to remind women and girls that their bodies do not belong to anybody but themselves, and the first function of a body is to take you through life. If you have made yourself ill to fit these unsustainable beauty standards, you steal your future joy. You steal your future pleasure, your future health. That is so much more valuable than a trend that’s going to change in 10 years anyway. If you were born 15 years ago, you’re not going to know that back in the ’90s, we were going through this, too. So it feels new, and everyone’s telling you that unless you’re skinny, you’re not attractive, you’re not going to find love or be happy.
But the more you find things that are uniquely you, the more you fall in love with yourself, and the less you're able to be changed by trends and what everyone else thinks. I think it's a deep mind shift, but it's powerful, that work that ripples out.
You started crafting solo shows during the pandemic, and now you’ve been performing them live. How important is it that we have these shows and conversations in person?
I keep thinking about the advances being made in technology right now, especially AI. You don't even have to film yourself. You can just have an AI avatar, and it looks perfectly natural and sounds like a real person. You can make them say whatever you like. There's a degree of accountability that you have as a performer when you show up in front of someone. You're responsible for their experience to a certain degree. So I've written down words. I’ve curated a setlist. I have had costumes made for an hour, just a brief hour with a bunch of people sitting in the dark, and it is the most magical thing. I think live performance of any kind is one of the most primal ways in which we connect with one another, in which we feel less isolated, and we feel seen, heard, and understood.
I also talk about queer sex issues and queer sex education in the show, and it’s hard to post about that on platforms that have strict community guidelines. But you deserve to be educated using terms that are biological and scientifically correct. You deserve to talk about consent, anatomy, and what your body is capable of doing, not just from a biological perspective but a pleasure perspective as well. I think a lot of problems, including gender-based violence, happen when people don’t understand or don’t talk about what it means to have sex that feels good. Meanwhile, you have tons of men behind microphones talking about how women’s bodies belong to men.
Live performance is a connection like no other, and I believe that social media has its place. I don't know that I have quite unlocked the secret, but I think some of it is decentralizing social media and (treating it as) a snapshot of the work that I do. And if you want to see more, come to my show, and I talk about it in a way that's uncensored.
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Pichi Keane will perform “Freshly Squeezed” for one night only on Nov. 26, 2024 at Sari Sari, Makati. Tickets are available at ticket2me.net. Follow Pichi on social media at @pichikeane.