The clearest way to explain Dynasty Handbag’s act might be to quote the artist herself. “I am not a wretched performance artist, or merely a comedian, or the ghastly clown, or simply an actor,” Jibz Cameron writes in her new memoir, Hell in a Handbag. “I perform as this alter ego. I do songs sorta and stand-up kinda and ummm I look insane. Yea. It’s like, funny performance art, or artsy comedy. It’s like my insides on the outsides.”
Her refusal to self-identify is intentional. In Cameron’s opinion, art shouldn’t have to explain itself. It should “move you through an unnamable thing; after all, it is another language.”
Cameron has performed as Dynasty Handbag for over 20 years, notably winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 2022 and co-creating a film titled Weirdo Night, which was shown at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. You might remember her 2015 Time-Based Art Festival work, one of that year’s most-lauded—a conceptual talk show called Good Morning Evening Feelings.
Your favorite performer likely loves Dynasty. Cameron’s late friend Paul Reubens sent her “dirty memes about lesbians,” and she’s collaborated with Kate Berlant, Cole Escola, and Ayo Edibiri through her ongoing variety show Weirdo Night!. SNL’s Sarah Sherman called the show “freak church,” with Dynasty Handbag as its “weirdo priest.”
The Los Angeles-based artist will return to Portland in celebration of Hell in a Handbag’s release, to discuss the memoir with local writer Sara Jaffe at Always Here Bookstore on May 10. Side fact: Jaffe was Erase Errata’s founding guitarist and the two know one another from their Bay Area punk scene days. Two evenings of “performance, film, and readings” at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art will follow on May 11 and 12.
Growing up in the “hippie criminal” atmosphere of a Northern California commune, Cameron’s childhood was shaped by her mother’s mental illness and her “charismatic and scary” father, who offered the family little stability. Hell in a Handbag contends with this past in a conversational style, punctuated with lines like “IMHO. I’m Hoe. Ha ha.” and “I can’t be bothered to explain what that is. Ask Jeeves.”
That easygoing approach makes Hell in a Handbag compulsively readable. I swallowed the 300-page memoir in two sittings, scarcely registering the outside world. Cameron pays little attention to literary polish; her prose is a vehicle for communicating as much as possible, as vividly as possible, at a rapid clip. Surprising images emerge. Late in the book, she describes an actor’s turmoil “zapping around under her flesh, like a very fragile bubble filled with screams.”
It’s easy reading, but not light reading. Cameron lays plain her experiences navigating queerness, statutory rape, childhood neglect, alcoholism, and a suicide in her family. She only briefly touches on her sobriety—in her words: “Who wants to read about someone getting sober? Snore.”—but Alcoholics Anonymous clearly played a pivotal role in it. “I went to a meeting once where someone was holding a sink over their head. No one said anything,” she recalls.
Hell in a Handbag is at its strongest when it connects Cameron’s life experiences—sometimes glittery, sometimes punk, and very often traumatic—to the formation of her Dynasty Handbag persona. As a child, she learned that improv comedy reflects “our unconscious brain on display,” and pulled inspiration from influences like Laurie Anderson, Divine, and John Waters. Of Prince, she writes: “He knew he was confusing people, he was doing it on purpose. I somehow had the sense, even at age ten, that Prince was a theater project.”
The reader smells notes of Dynasty Handbag’s heady perfume in the videos Cameron made as a San Francisco Art Institute student, and in the campy lyrics of the Roofies, her late-’90s punk band. But Cameron’s alter ego didn’t fully crystallize until after her father’s death and her divorce in the early aughts. “I needed somewhere to put all these fucked up feelings,” she writes. “So, I put them into a 4-track, and called them Dynasty Handbag.”
Dynasty Handbag may feel high-concept, but she’s fiercely corporeal. Cameron writes: “I am 51 years old, and not every queer loser theatergoer gets to have that privilege. My boddy oddy has changed in ways you can’t imagine. It’s a temple of secret lumps, and it’s holy. So don’t try me.” Her alter ego looks “ugly” on purpose—a droll response to misogynistic beauty standards and our tendency to accidentally highlight that which we wish to hide. She adorns herself in lumpy undergarments, dirty pantyhose, and smeared lipstick, lampooning every restrictive system—heteronormativity and capitalism especially.
Hell in a Handbag serves as a reminder that funny, honest art can still evolve from darkness. It’s a total relief. “I believe people want to see wildness because they need to see it,” Cameron writes, “not just because it’s entertaining.” She understands that performance art can help both artist and audience process trauma. Referencing scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, she notes: “We, as queers, create new worlds for ourselves… we are not necessarily escaping, but we are also not activating the wound. When we (I guess me?) are really raw, I try to use the space of performance-making to move the feeling along in some capacity.”
The memoir feels like an extension of that artistic method. In Hell in a Handbag, Cameron demonstrates how trauma can alchemize through strangeness and sincerity. After all, her upbringing is just the beginning of the story. What happens next is where things get truly interesting.
Hell in a Handbag was published by Dopamine/Semiotext(e) on Tues May 5. Jibz Cameron will be everywhere this weekend: She delivers a “special surprise” at Funhouse, PICA’s annual gala, at Oaks Park Dance Pavilion, 7805 SE Oaks Park, on Sat May 9, $300+, pica.org. She discusses Hell in a Handbag with Sara Jaffe at Always Here Bookstore, 4555 N Williams, on Sun May 10, FREE with rsvp, alwaysherebooks.com. She performs and reads at PICA, 15 NE Hancock, on May 11-12, $20-$50 sliding scale, pica.org.
