Earlier in The Power Issue, we took a look at Claude Cahun: the French Surrealist who employed masquerading as a means of challenging prescriptive heteronormativity. While Cahun imprinted her message on her body, 27-year old performance artist Adrian L. Acosta has chosen a different route: he’s created an entirely different character to challenge social, political and gender conventions: Amnesia Sparkles.

While the idea of drag as power certainly doesn't break new theoretical ground, what's most interesting about the case of Adrian aka Amnesia is the fine line between resistance and repression in his work. You see, Amnesia acts not only as a mean for Adrian to challenge dominant ideology, but also as a tool for him to challenge his own misgivings.

Harnessing the transformative power of disguise, Acosta has spent the past ten years refining the unrefined act of Amnesia Sparkles. Aside from the obvious subversion of male/female dichotomy, Acosta uses Amnesia as a tool of social - and entirely un-PC - commentary. He explains:

[Amnesia is] a form of expressing thoughts and ideas that would otherwise get resistance. There are things that you can’t just go around saying to people. …When you’re in drag, you can say anything you want and people will listen … It is empowering in the sense that you have no rules.

Acosta shapes each Amnesia appearance to the zeitgeist, highlighting the absurdity of life and providing a much needed distraction from the dreary context. "It’s just breaking through all the bullshit...and knowing that you can have fun..."

Though Amnesia Sparkles can’t keep anything to herself, Acosta’s far more guarded. In fact, questions into his past were promptly dismissed, “We’ll skip that part". He later reiterated:

I don’t share much. I don’t share much with my friends and I don’t share much with people in general.

When asked if he evades the past as a form of control, Acosta laughed before changing the subject. He did, however, reveal that he hails from Uruguay, grew up with two siblings – an older brother and a younger sister – and moved from Florida to New York four years ago. Not surprisingly, Acosta is willing to chat about Amnesia’s distinguished origins.

A budding fagling, Acosta joined a high school-sponsored drag pageant - unoriginally entitled "Ms. HERcules" - and began brainstorming on what…or, rather, whom he would portray on stage.

I wanted her to be an airhead, but speak the truth through stupidity. People are more perceptive to someone who’s less pretentious...At the same time she was dumb in the sense that she forgets things. My friend said, ‘Like she has Amnesia’. And I said, ‘That’s a good name’.

Acosta went on to win top prize, launching a performative career that would bring him from Florida to New York, hustling from stage to stage, seen on such media spectacles as American Idol and, most recently, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus.

While Amnesia has brought many a laugh, perhaps more importantly Amensia allows Acosta to drop his own defenses and share his own perspective without fear of admonishment.

That’s the time for me to share… It’s an edited form of sharing. You pick and choose what you want to share, then you package it and send out the message...

It is only through self-preservative performance that Acosta can verbalize certain aspects of his personality. As potent as the act of taking on a new identity, even Amnesia Sparkles isn't woman enough to properly channel all of Acosta's creative energies.

Always an avid drawer, in recent years Acosta's been trying his hand at photography. It is through photography that Acosta expresses the non-verbal components of his personality - not least of all his hesitancy to discuss the past and the self. "Whenever I have a difficulty expressing certain emotions or certain concepts verbally, I like to tap into the visual sense." As his work improves, Acosta's looking forward to furthering his photographic career.

Don't worry, he's still got plans for Amnesia; as we all know, there's no keeping a good woman down.

For more on Acosta's work, check out his website.