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"Hybrid" has become a buzz-word, but actually what does it mean to move between identity formations? Perhaps there is some relationship between crossing cultures and mixing media, but if so, the chemistry of this relationship remains
largely unexplored. The influence of the buzz-word has been to promote a happy-to be-hybrid ethos in the contemporary art world which belies the dangerously troubled cultural history of hybridity. The defense of purity, whether genetic, aesthetic or cultural, has manifested itself through deeply neurotic forms of aggression that are unlikely to be eroded by any fashionable sanctioning of the principle of hybridity. Identity formations are heavily invested, and therefore heavily protected, because they afford certain kinds of securities, and the loss of these is not to be taken lightly. Merlinda Bobis is a performer whose first medium was literature. She moved to Australia in 1991 from the Philippines, where she had completed a Master of Arts in literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila. She describes the experience of the transition as one of quite traumatic alienation, with the personal feelings of loneliness and homesickness having the side effect of writer's block. As a writer, she had been rained in European and American genres at Santo Tomas, and retrospectively, she can give a very writerly account of the process of trying to deal with a cultural alienation that included an estrangement from the verbal modes of expression in which she was skilled by adoption.
I danced on my own in my room every night, carving the space in the lounge room. When you move you create different bodies and these different bodies were keeping me company. I found that... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline