Transcending Gender, Performing Communion: At the Table with Kama La Mackerel and Travis Alabanza

Abstract This article examines how contemporary performance artists Kama La Mackerel and Travis Alabanza use the table as a symbolic and material site to challenge heteronormative structures and create spaces of queer communion. Analyzing La Mackerel’s Truth and Punishment (2018) and Alabanza’s Burgerz (2018) alongside the video work Burgerz and Chips with Travis Alabanza (2022), we explore how these performances stage ritualized acts – eating, drinking, remembering – that reframe experiences of anti-trans violence and invite audiences into counter-communal gatherings. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer use and Mary Douglas’s anthropology of meals, we argue that both artists disrupt normative spatial, emotional, and linguistic arrangements through repetition and embodied gestures. The table – whether as altar, kitchen counter, or dining surface – serves not only as a symbol but as a material site of confrontation, memory, and transformation. Reworking liturgical structures and domestic rituals, La Mackerel and Alabanza turn punitive encounters into moments of resistance, affirmation, and joy.