Filipka Rutkowska, “ The Iron Lipstick ”, performance

The Iron Lipstick is a performance combining spoken word and choreography, in which Margaret Thatcher is embodied and reimagined as a queer spectre, despite her anti-gay politics. Inspired by Damian Barr’s memoir Maggie and Me, a queer coming-of-age story set in 1980s Scotland, the work reanimates Thatcher’s iconic speeches to create a political fiction that calls for the abolition of gender in order to imagine a genderless society. Thatcher becomes a costume to be destabilised, multiplied, and re-performed: domination is recast as drag, and power is dismantled through performance. By queering a figure synonymous with oppression, the piece stages a paradoxical intimacy with history’s demons, exposing how they resurface today while opening the possibility of taming and transforming them. The performance incorporates a replica of Thatcher’s costume, recently displayed at a Christie’s auction.


Performance is realised with the generous support of The Adam Mickiewicz Institute.