Here were people who had drawn a line and at last insisted on their right to determine their own identities ... They would love, dress, speak, work (or not work) as they chose. They would make their own music, dance to their own rhythm. They would become gypsies, mendicants, savages, witch doctors, rebels, clowns, freaks, and they would do so openly ... asking nobody's permission, making no apologies. (Roszak 1979:xxvi)

In a liminoidal counterworld of permission, participants experiment with desired sources of authenticity as a means of (re)creating their identities. In this chapter I am interested in the explicitly festive component of ConFest - wherein participants may 'stray from the paths'. There are three parts. In the first, I suggest ConFest privileges Turner's subjunctive mood. It is a ludic realm of pure possibility in which participants are permitted to 'play out' ('down', 'across', 'up'). Yet, I expand upon Turner's insights in a focus on the transgressive body. I thus detail a unique social synapse occasioning extra-ordinary, and potentially transformative, corporeal experience. In the second, I detail two interwoven strategies via which the 'other' is implicated in ConFesters' desires: carnality (getting 'in touch' with other participants), and alterity ('othering' the self, especially via indigeneity). Special consideration is given to appropriation which, I argue, is a complex process requiring reconsideration in cultural theory. With particular attention to performative appropriation, or mimesis, in the third part I discuss the on-site presence of complicated DiY identities, fashioned via identification (often fleeting) with multiple nodes of difference.

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