By Mia Bock
This essay evaluates Jacques Rancière’s claim that aesthetic acts shape experience to create new modes of perception and forms of political subjectivity. Although Rancière successfully demonstrates how aesthetic acts facilitate political subjectivisation through one’s enactments of their inherent equality, I argue that the acts of disruption that enable political subjectivisation do not necessitate a redistribution of the sensible. Through analysing Catholic drag as an aesthetic intervention in the sensible order, I contend that while aesthetic acts may indeed render excluded subjects visible, they do not always entail new intelligible possibilities. In a heterosexist society which already determines queer subjects as inherently disruptive, their aesthetic disruptions in the sensible order may be interpreted as confirming rather than reconfiguring existing modes of perception. I argue that Rancière’s account of political subjectivisation—which does not require recognition by others—is complicated by the redistribution of the sensible which requires some transformation in what is perceive-able. Therefore, I contend that an aesthetic act cannot redistribute the sensible through disrupting the police order alone, it must also entail making perceptible possibilities that are otherwise excluded from intelligibility.
Rancière argues that aesthetic acts shape experience to create new modes of perception and forms of political subjectivity. Aesthetics for Rancière is much broader than art: it refers to the “system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”[1] In other words, aesthetics concerns what is sensible: that which is visible, sayable, intelligible, and perceptible in a specific social order.[2] Given that what can be said, seen, and understood is determined within a specific (non-neutral) social order, conditions of perception are also political—shaping that which appears as meaningful and legitimate.[3] This is why Ranciere asserts an aesthetic core to politics. He observes that different people occupy different positions in the common world according to an uneven distribution of the sensible, which delineates who is able to partake in common affairs and whose experiences remain unable to be sensed or comprehended.[4] This partitioning of the sensible is “based on a distribution of spaces, time and forms of activity” that assigns particular positions and capabilities to particular groups.[5] Rancière terms this ordering of the social world “the police”: the arrangement of “the political community as a collective body” which Raffaela Puggioni explains “works through consensus” to protect and maintain “dominant hierarchical systems.”[6] The police order is therefore the force that legitimises fundamental divisions of places, roles, and bodies in its partitioning of the sensible.[7]
Politics, in Rancière’s system, refers to the moments when the current distribution of the sensible is disrupted.[8] These moments of rupture arise through ‘dissensus’, “an alternative vision [of reality] that breaks from the known and the familiar.”[9] Subsequently, politics entails making visible those who had no part in the existing distribution of the sensible through the enactment and verification of their ‘inherent’ equality which had been denied by the police order.[10] One way that the current distribution of the sensible can be disrupted is through aesthetic acts.[11] For Rancière, aesthetic acts, are necessarily political because they “intervene in the general distribution” of the sensible by revealing new ways of being.[12] This intervention in the sensible is apparently not dependent on the content or interpretation of the aesthetic act itself; because the sensible order structures the conditions under which perception occurs, and aesthetic acts redefine the boundaries of sensible possibilities, they create new modes of perception.[13] Concurrently, they create new forms of political subjectivity when those who were marginalised become participants in the shared world, as opposed to occupants of the identities assigned to them by the police order.
The case study of Catholic Drag demonstrates the applicability of Rancière’s theory whilst also exposing some potential limitations. Responding to the exclusion of women from clerical authority and the marginalisation of queer identities within the Catholic Church, Dean and Archer rewrote this narrative of exclusion by centring their intersecting queer, woman and Catholic identities through a drag mass performance at their university, wherein they occupied a sacred space traditionally reserved for male authority (clergy).[14] Reflecting on their performance and the audience’s testimony, Dean and Archer explain that their entry into a space previously deemed inaccessible by their “queer, female bodies” caused their audience to perceive new possibilities for queer women within the Catholic tradition.[15] In Rancièrean terms, this drag performance—as an aesthetic act—illustrates a redistribution of the sensible by making previously excluded forms of religious participation perceptible. However, the reception of other Catholic drag performers suggests that aesthetic interventions can also be interpreted through existing stereotypes of queer transgression and sacrilege and may thereby maintain the current distribution of the sensible.
This possibility complicates Ranciere’s conception of political subjectivisation. Rancière posits that political subjectivisation occurs when those excluded from the social order become recognised as participants in a shared world “distinct from the part or roles [they had] previously [been] designated.”[16] Consequently, Dean and Archer’s drag mass may be understood as enabling their political subjectivisation due to the evidencing of their equality as participants in the sensible despite hegemonic exclusion. However, the reception of fellow Catholic drag performers, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (hereinafter the Sisters), elucidates how Catholic drag may be perceived as confirming, rather than disrupting, the ‘essentially transgressive nature’ of queerness assigned by the police order. The Sisters are a charity organisation run by Drag Nuns who were banned from attending a queer event in 2023 after being (wrongfully) alleged as an “anti-Catholic hate group.” [17] Instead of being recognised as legitimate queer religious subjects, the police order interpreted the Sisters as confirming their pre-existing assumptions about queer transgression, sacrilege and moral abhorrence. In this event, the aesthetic act may have successfully rendered excluded bodies visible without necessitating that they were understood as legitimate participants in the shared world.
This challenges Rancière’s apparent equation of “recognizability” and “visibilization within the sensible and political fields.”[18] Queer Catholic drag demonstrates that visibility and recognition are not identical, because even if queer Catholic bodies are visible, they may not be recognised as anything more than transgressors infiltrating the sanctified Catholic tradition. That is, they may only be intelligible through the very stereotypes imposed upon them by the police order. This poses further difficulties for Rancière’s contention that aesthetic acts necessarily redistribute the sensible. As Petherbridge explains, aesthetic acts, for Rancière, enable “a form of ‘dis-identification’” from the police order which delimits subjects, and it is “only through such disruptive practices” that a person becomes a political subject.[19] However, if a subject’s identity is already constructed as inherently disruptive, then any act of disruption may be taken as confirmation that they are precisely what the police order claimed them to be. This creates a paradox whereby the possibility of disrupting an established distribution of the sensible is entangled within the conditions of intelligibility that the disruption seeks to contest. Thus, aesthetic acts cannot be said to necessarily redistribute the sensible, if the existing distribution renders the act only intelligible as confirming the disruptive nature of the actor.
One might counter that this argument requires redistributing the sensible to completely overhaul the police order. In other words, why is the act of disruption itself not sufficient to redistribute the sensible, even if it only marginally changes what is perceived as possible for queer or Catholic subjects? I concur that aesthetic disruptions might sufficiently create new modes of perception without eliminating established ones altogether and that this would indeed constitute a redistribution of the sensible. Afterall, it would be impossible for a single aesthetic act to affect a complete eradication of oppressive perceptions of queer subjects in all individuals within a social order. However, I am not arguing that if established perceptions remain after an act of disruption, then Ranciere’s account of the redistribution of the sensible is invalid. My argument is that even if disruption introduces new possibilities of what is perceptible (like the potential for queer Catholic clerical authority), it is unclear whether it redistributes the sensible if the current distribution determines in advance that disruptive acts by queer subjects are confirmation of their assigned essentially transgressive identity. Therefore, although the actor may disidentify with police logic, and thereby undergo political subjectivisation, this does not necessarily entail a redistribution of the sensible if their disruption is only intelligible through the identity the police order assigns them.
However, Rancière might object that in making political subjectivisation dependent on the police order’s recognition, this critique misunderstands his theory. As Seth Mayer explains, “politics is when those who are excluded from this partitioning of social reality break with police logic, contradicting its definitions and orders on the basis of equality.”[20] Thus, political subjectivisation emerges in the enactment of equality itself, not through recognition by others. To accept that an act of disruption simply confirms the stereotype imposed upon its subject by the police order would be to accept police logic. Instead, it might be suggested that the redistribution of the sensible occurs precisely because Catholic Drag artists break with this police logic of queer marginalisation and queer transgression. Hence, it would be irrelevant how their aesthetic act is interpreted by the police order, because the political is precisely when the subject rebels against police logic. However, this objection only addresses recognition as wider social endorsement or acceptance, not whether the conditions of intelligibility which structure perception within the sensible order are transformed.
So, although political subjectivisation does not require recognition by others, it remains unclear whether enacting a break with police logic necessarily redistributes the sensible by transforming what can be perceived and understood as possible. It is not necessary for a transformation in what is perceptible to entail a complete overhaul of the sensible order, for the mere appearance of excluded bodies in spaces from which they are typically barred from entering may sufficiently establish new understandings of religious participation in the social order. The example of Catholic drag might be interpreted as confirming police logic stereotypes of transgression in some (as in the case of the Sisters), and as enabling new modes of perception in others (as in the case of Dean and Archer’s audience). Afterall, police logic is not necessarily adopted or reproduced identically—or even at all—by all subjects within its order. Hence, the perception of Catholic drag performance as a new mode of religious participation, rather than a confirmation of an inherently “disruptive” nature, would mean that this aesthetic intervention indeed caused a redistribution of the sensible regardless of any persisting prejudice.
One might raise that this evaluation risks making a redistribution of the sensible contingent on an observer’s transformation in perception. However, I suggest that if no observer interpreted Catholic drag outside of police logic, then the aesthetic act could not be understood as sufficiently redistributing the sensible? If only the artist’s break with police logic is sufficient to redistribute the sensible, then it is unclear how aesthetic interventions enable new modes of perception and political subjectivities to be recognised beyond the boundaries of the current sensible order. This does not mean that queer Catholic aesthetic interventions are barred from resisting or disrupting police logic, but that their disruptive potential does not in itself establish that the sensible has been redistributed because the police order is capable of absorbing this resistance into its reductive and pre-established definitions of queerness. To sufficiently redistribute the sensible, I contend that an aesthetic act must go beyond disruption where disruption is understood as confirmation of a transgressive identity. It must make perceptible a possibility that challenges the police order’s definitions. This does not require universal recognition nor a complete overhaul of the sensible order. However, if no one recognises the aesthetic act as opening up possibilities beyond those prescribed by the police order, then the sensible has not been redistributed because that which is able to be perceived and comprehended as possible would remain unchanged.
Dean and Archer’s Catholic drag performance elucidates how aesthetic acts can intervene in the distribution of the sensible through disrupting boundaries of visibility and creating new forms of political subjectivity. However, I have argued that political subjectivisation does not necessarily entail a redistribution of the sensible, given that aesthetic acts do not always render subjects intelligible in new ways. As the reception of the Sisters demonstrates, an aesthetic intervention may be absorbed into pre-existing modes of perception and interpreted as confirming the identity the police order ascribes its actor. This does not require a redistribution of the sensible to be universally recognised or to affect an eradication of police logic. Rather, I contend that a queer Catholic aesthetic intervention can only redistribute the sensible if it is able to be perceived outside of the police logic’s absorption of disruption as confirmation of inherent transgressiveness. This is why Dean and Archer’s intervention—which the audience testified as enabling them to perceive new possibilities for queer Catholic subjects—did affect a redistribution of the sensible. That is, their performance was not taken as confirmation of a disruptive queer essence. While political subjectivisation can occur through disruption alone, disruption does not by itself establish that the sensible has been redistributed.
Mia is a third-year Bachelor of Advanced Humanities student majoring in Religious Studies and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include queer theology, mysticism, post-structuralist and feminist philosophy.
Bibliography
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[1] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Zed Books, 2021), 8.
[2] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
[3] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
[4] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 7.
[5] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
[6] Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics,” in Reading Rancière, ed. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011), 3; Raffaela Puggioni, “Which Intelligible Words? Reading Femicide Through Rancière’s Concept of ‘La Mésentente,’” Philosophies (Basel) 10 (2025): 4, https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10020030.
[7] Danielle Petherbridge, “Recognizability, Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible: Rancière, Honneth and Butler,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 27 (2019): 66, https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2019.894.
[8] Rafaella Puggioni, “Which Intelligible Words? Reading Femicide Through Rancière’s Concept of ‘La Mésentente,’” Philosophies 10 (2025), 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10020030.
[9] Puggioni, “Which Intelligible Words?’” 4.
[10] Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization,” October 61 (1992): 59–60, https://doi.org/10.2307/778785.
[11] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 41.
[12] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
[13] Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 3.
[14] Allyson S. Dean and Whitney J. Archer, “Transgressing the Father Figure: Performing Queer Theology as an Act of Liberation,” Theology & Sexuality 23 (2017): 73-74, https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2017.1341209.
[15] Dean and Archer, “Transgressing the Father Figure,” 74, 79.
[16] Petherbridge, “Recognizability, Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible,” 68.
[17] Seth Abramovitch, “Dodgers Apologize, Reverse Ban on Drag Group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 22 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/dodgers-apologize-drag-nuns-sisters-perpetual-indulgence-1235498144/.
[18] Petherbridge, “Recognizability, Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible,” 67.
[19] Petherbridge, “Recognizability, Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible,” 68.
[20] Seth Mayer, “Interpreting the Situation of Political Disagreement: Rancière and Habermas,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 27 (2019): 13, https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2019.888.
Featured Image: Coronation of the Virgin, Enguerrand Quarton, 1453.
