The American queercore performance artist, musician and zine-maker who, with Ron Athey, curated the Los Angeles club nights and festivals that gathered the queer-transgression circle · the organiser at the centre of that world.
Vaginal Davis is an American performance artist, musician, film-maker and zine-maker, a founding figure of queercore, and the Bureau files her in the Performance sub-section as the organiser and connector of the queer-transgression circle the archive enters through Ron Athey. A content advisory governs the filing: the work is explicit and confronting by design, documented here as serious practice rather than provocation, with no graphic detail.
Davis emerged from the Los Angeles underground of the 1980s and became one of the central figures of queercore, the queer-punk current that ran alongside hardcore and the noise undergrounds. Her practice spans performance, drag, painting, film and a long line of bands and projects (among them PME and the pointed Black Fag), and the band-and-club form is what ties her, like the other figures in this part of the sub-section, to the music underground rather than only to the gallery.
She is also one of the underground's great self-publishers. Davis's zines are a primary document of the queercore and queer-punk world, the printed-matter wing of a practice that otherwise lives in performance, and they place her in the same do-it-yourself tradition of self-issued media that the archive documents on the cassette-label side of its sound. The zine, the band and the club night are her three instruments.
Her direct tie to the archive is curatorial. With Ron Athey, Davis co-curated the G.I.M.P. Un-Ltd. queer club night in Los Angeles (2000–2001) and an eighteen-hour Outfest performance festival (2001–2002), the events that gathered the circle this sub-section documents, with performances by Athey, Davis, Kembra Pfahler's Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and many others. If Athey is the archive's entry point to this performance world, Davis is the figure who organised much of it.
Her standing has been confirmed at the highest level: a major retrospective, Magnificent Product, surveyed fifty years of her work at MoMA PS1 across 2025–2026. The Bureau files her on the connector test, as the curator and central figure of the queer-performance circle the archive's transgressive sound grew up beside, and as a reminder that the performance underground was organised, documented and sustained by the artists themselves.