I have discussed ways in which otherness, or the 'other', is heavily implicated in participants' desires. In an uninhibited topos of tactility and promiscuity, liminary voluptuaries may experience unconventional reconfigurations of their bodies, enact erotic fantasies or disrupt gender conventions. A variety of valorised 'others' are subscribed to, assumed, mimicked. I focused specifically on indigeneity, concluding that appropriation and/or cultural borrowing - less straightforward and openly dismissible than has been assumed by some researchers - is a theme requiring substantial revision. Since performative appropriation (mimesis) is indelibly human and identification not one-dimensional (in a time when identities are increasingly irresolute and restless), this requirement is made all the more necessary. Integral to the self's journey of becoming, it is clear that carnality and alterity are complex interwoven components of the ConFest experience.

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