Drag Performers Research Articles

Phenomenological Exploration of How Microaggressions Are Experienced by LGBTQ+ Drag Performers of Color

Phenomenological Exploration of How Microaggressions Are Experienced by LGBTQ+ Drag Performers of Color

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

Huysuz Virjin vs. the Law? Drag Bans in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

Abstract: The renaissance of drag in the last fifteen years has coincided with the rise of right-wing populist governments and their efforts to regulate queer performances across the world. The career of Turkey’s most famous drag queen Huysuz Virjin [Cranky Virjin] demonstrates the complex histories of drag bans, and how conservative regimes employ not only the law and explicit censorship policies but also extralegal strategies to regulate drag performances. This case study shows that while drag bans may aggravate the precarity that characterizes trans lives and transphobia may harm drag performers, the careers of cis drag queens may remain unaffected by or even indirectly benefit from anti-trans legislation.

NOBODY CAN DRAG ME DOWN: AGING AS A DRAG PERFORMER

Abstract This presentation will detail the findings of an exploratory, qualitative research study examining the intersection of aging and drag performance. Even though drag queens have achieved significant levels of visibility in mainstream entertainment and have become increasingly present topics of discussion in news outlets, modern media, and even political landscapes, they are an understudied and underrepresented population (Knutson et al., 2020; O’Brien, 2018). Older drag queens have yet to be studied in the social science literature (Henneberry et al., 2022). “Drag Queens possess unique characteristics as a subpopulation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community that warrant exploration” (Knutson, Koch, Sneed, & Lee, 2018). This research aims to understand and represent the relatively understudied population of drag queens in academic literature while drawing attention to the specific sub-population of older adults in the profession. A semi-structured interview protocol and thematic analysis was utilized to understand the unique perspectives of self identified drag performers over the age of 50 (n=15; ages 54-94). Examining drag artistry and expression through the lens of aging has revealed themes of drag as a form of armor, ageism within the community, and shifts in social perceptions of drag performers. This presentation will introduce the term “dragism” in an attempt to explain the discrimination against drag queens within the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the interplay of both dragism and ageism for the participants of this study (Donorfio et al., 2022).

Mermaids and Drag Gueens: A Queer Look at Mermaiding

Mermaiding is the practice of wearing a tail designed to look like that of a fish. In this work I look at this phenomenon from the lens of gender and performance, aiming to understand if mermaiding constitutes a form of drag, by establishing the position of the mermaid symbol in queer and transgender spaces, then comparing testimonies of drag performers and professional and amateur mermaids. I also look at this practice through the lens of post-human theory, determining in which ways the mermaid body constitutes an object of identification for the person wearing a tail. By doing so, I demonstrate the similarities between the phenomena and their meaning, and show that the emergence of this practice affirms posthuman predictions of a future where the connection between human body and identity dissolve and enable new, hybrid identities.

Mourning murmurations: Speculative fagulation and the ecological lament in drag down under

Drag performers in Australia perform anthro-decentric laments for and beside endemic nonhuman species. They catalyse a public exteriorization of multi-species grief and rage in response to compounding losses in a situated, contested Anthropocene. Approaching queer performance beside intersections in new materialism and the environmental humanities, this article proposes drag as a device of speculative fabulation – of story-telling or fable-making in-the-present for generative, undefined outcomes in un-promised futures. Imbricating qualitative visual and textual analyses with autoethnography and a methodology informed by avian ecology, the article shares stories of ecological laments in the context of contemporary Australian performance, art and culture. It presents a brief review/revue of performances by artists based in Warrang (Sydney): Vallarie Van Gogh dances as a burning human-galah hybrid; Latai Taumoepeau goes to war as a monstrous coral reef; Phasmahammer (Justin Shoulder) bends mythology and matter imagining post-apocalyptic memories of birds.

Drag in a Changing Scene, Volumes 1 & 2 Volume 1: Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2020) Volume 2: Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2022)

Review of: Drag in a Changing Scene, Volumes 1 & 2 Volume 1: Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2020) London: Methuen Drama, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-35008-294-6, h/bk, $110.00 ISBN 978-1-35031-919-6, p/bk, $39.95 ISBN 978-1-35008-295-3, e-book, $35.95 Volume 2: Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories, Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier (Eds) (2022) London: Methuen Drama, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1-35010-436-5, h/bk, $115.00 ISBN 978-1-35019-851-7, p/bk, $39.95 ISBN 978-1-35010-437-2, e-book, $35.95

Phet: Thai Drag Artists’ Perspectives of Thai Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Phet in Thailand is culturally, socially, and historically different from the Western notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. Because of this, the understandings, construction, and expression of one’s phet in Thailand should theoretically be different from the understandings, construction, and expression of one’s gender and sexuality in the West. Yet, through engaging in the art of drag, it may be possible that understandings of phet may have been shifted since Thai drag is heavily influenced by the West. Therefore, in this paper, I tested whether Thai drag artists’ understandings of phetwould be different from Western drag artists’ understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality through engaging in drag. Furthermore, I explored the understandings of an individual’s phet through one’s identity in and out of drag as well as through engaging in drag shows, both as a performer and as an audience, through conducting phenomenological research under the qualitative research method with the regular drag performers at the House of Heals bar, located in Bangkok, Thailand. Not only that, but I also explored the notion of drag as activism, drawing on current political events in Thai society, such as the ongoing #FreeYouth movement.

Spectral fabulations: Belgrade drag performances refashioning socialist memories

This article explores how drag performers in late postsocialist Belgrade refashion memories of socialist Yugoslavia, queering memory by disrupting the linear temporality of the postsocialist transition and challenging the erasure of the city’s socialist Yugoslav past. Belgrade is home to a thriving drag community, including a growing group of performers who engage with memories of socialist Yugoslavia, drawing on its diverse legacy from costumes, ideologies and cultural production. Analysing performance material from two of these drag identities – Gospođa Pereca and Novoslovenka – I argue that drag performers could be considered spectral fabulations, which emerge in the haunted landscape of postsocialist Belgrade, a city characterised by political depression, particularly for its LGBTQ+ community. Confronting literature on hauntings and queer performance, spectral fabulation sees drag identities in Belgrade as posthuman apparitions who use socialist memory to disrupt teleological understandings of history as well as to imagine utopian futures, which actively work against the conditions of political depression in the city. This ultimately points to the indeterminacy of the postsocialist transition, containing the potential form for both political depression and queer futurities.

“We All Country”: Region, Place, and Community Language among Oklahoma City Drag Performers

This study aims to build on limited research in Oklahoma LGBTQ+ populations and to consider intersectional queer and trans perspectives on region and place as constructs within broader sociolinguistic work. The primary data come from linguistic ethnographic and queer folk linguistic work in a community of drag performers who detail the hardships of navigating a region like Oklahoma as nonheterosexual, noncisgender, and in some cases non-White Oklahomans. Their discussions of 39th Street, a culturally important site with a long history of LGBTQ+ protection, reveal that it, too, is riddled with racial, transphobic, and class-based ideologies that intersect with economic and practice-based difficulties for both new and seasoned performers. What emerges is an indication that queer kinship systems, familial communities within the community of practice, are integral parts of survival for performers and that language is both affected by such kinship systems and employed as a tool for navigating this place.

Dirty Martini Delivers Gender Justice

In the 1980s I lived in the East Village, and as I was strolling around the neighborhood one day with a couple of Puerto Rican friends, we noticed that a large group of drag queens were strutting up and down the street, and everyday people were going about their daily activities wearing wigs, not properly arranged on their heads but placed there as a hat, a quirky flourish, and a statement. It was Wigstock, the festival of drag performances founded in 1984 as a response to the hostile anti-LGBTQ environment fostered by the state’s reaction to the AIDS crisis and the neighborhood’s increasing gentrification. My friends and I quickly donned wigs and headed to Tompkins Square, where the stage had been set up for the performances. Dressed in extravagantly creative outfits and over-the-top, towering wigs, the queens on stage were by turns shady, empowering, and campy, all the while promoting a world of tolerance and love, a kind of queer utopia. Lady Bunny had even tried to put a wig on the Statue of Liberty, thus reclaiming the entire city as an LGBTQ, gender-fluid, liberated territory. Soon I was backstage photographing Lady Bunny, RuPaul, and Joey Arias as they were beginning their successful careers. And infused with a sense of urgency—that we might not be alive the following year—I began to take photographs of the ephemeral utopian gestures that they were creating as they claimed the common communal ground as a space of love, liberty, and nonviolent joyous diversity.In 2019, after a long twelve-year hiatus and nearly forty years from its beginning, the Wigstock Festival was revived at the gentrified and refurbished Pier 17. But the city had changed by then, and many performers and artists now found it financially impossible to remain a part of it. This is the world that my series Dirty Martini Delivers Gender Justice at Wigstock 2019 attempts to capture—the world of a corporate neoliberal New York where drag performers and activists have been disconnected from community and forced to look at the city from the renovated and reclaimed margins of the East River piers. Facing a homogeneously gentrified Manhattan skyline, which is visible in some photographs in the series, Dirty Martini’s mordantly joyful parody of national symbols critiques the city’s latest development and its sense of justice, turning consumerism not into profitability but into a celebration of drag performance’s excessively voluptuous, baroque, hard-to-manage-and-mainstream body.With this series I seek to confront New York’s latest urban development with drag performance’s historical gender utopia, while at the same time to reflect on the contemporary commodification and mainstreaming of gender-dissident performance and its resistances—a reflection that intersects with the broader preoccupation of my photographic oeuvre: documenting the possibilities for creating a resistant and joyful sense of community among populations that have been targeted and displaced and forced to face the devastating impact of colonialism, AIDS, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance

Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance examines the creative works, aesthetic practices, and lives of gender-nonconforming people, filling an important void in trans studies. Documenting the creative knowledge production of trans and drag performers produces a much-needed living archive that has been historically suppressed and erased.

How Visibility, Hypervisibility, and Invisibility Shape Library Staff and Drag Performer Perceptions of and Experiences with Drag Storytimes in Public Libraries

This article uses data from interviews with public library staff and drag performers to understand how discourses surrounding queer visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility affect library staff members’ and performers’ perceptions of drag storytimes. Informed by interviews with library staff and drag performers, we argue that hypervisibility and invisibility narratives mark drag storytimes as dangerous and trendy and may unduly influence how some library staff members view these events. Conversely, other staff members and drag performers engage in significant tactical emotional and physical labor to recognize these events as inherently queer and powerful critical literacy programs. Understanding how varying degrees of visibility mediate library staff and performer perceptions of and experiences with drag storytimes lends insights into larger narratives centered on queerness and belonging within libraries. Drag performers’ narrative accounts also offer paths by which library staff may work with performers to promote authentic queer visibility.

Transformista, Travesti, Transgénero

This essay considers the stories of Blaccucini and Ángel Daniel, two Black transgender drag performers from Cuba, and dwells on the relationship they imagine between their work as performers and their subjectivities as trans people. The author situates these narratives within queer Cuban and Caribbean studies, noticing the ways they push back against renderings of gender and sexuality as inherently distinct categories. Instead, for these artist-thinkers, trans subjectivity is informed by various experiences related to gender, sexuality, race, class, and geography. The essay offers some possibilities for greater nuance in accounts of sexual subjectivity in Cuba and the Caribbean and locates the stakes of these discussions in broader transnational LGBT rights discourses.

You Better Vote: Drag Performers and Voter Mobilization in the 2020 Election

ABSTRACTDrag has long been part of the LGBTQ rights movement. Drag performers play an important role as community leaders and political activists. Today, drag performers are also popular celebrities in the rest of society. This article explores the role of drag performers as community leaders and celebrities in the context of the 2020 presidential election. To understand this, we interviewed drag performers about their experiences using drag to mobilize voters. Research shows that Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts are more successful if they are led by volunteers and include trusted messengers while still being unexpected in some way. Drag performers are community leaders and volunteers and, when speaking about politics, deliver unexpected—and thus memorable—messages. The drag performers that we interviewed demonstrate the potential for drag artists to be effective GOTV messengers, in both the LGBTQ community and society more broadly.

“For me, it is an intellectual freedom issue”: Drag storytimes, neutrality, and ALA core values

Drag storytimes are increasingly popular programing events in which drag performers lead storytime in public libraries or other settings; they have been both popular and contentious. In this study, we utilized data from a national survey of 458 library staff and 26 subsequent interviews to investigate connections between drag storytime, intellectual freedom, neutrality, and other core librarianship values. The data was analyzed inductively and several key themes emerged: hosting drag storytimes is an intellectual freedom stance; various perspectives on the American Library Association stance in support of drag storytimes; connections to other core values; emphasizing diversity to serve one’s community; and contesting the neutrality of libraries. We found difficult-to-reconcile stances of “presenting all sides” and “taking a side,” but we suggest a way forward by focusing on the outcome of collective self-governance (based on core values of intellectual freedom and democracy).

What’s Live Got to Do with It?

With Covid-19 closure of performance spaces, drag performers were in a unique position due to the historic relationship between queer performance and recorded media, and the history of LGBTQ2+ community building through social media. Rather than — or perhaps in addition to—constituting a moment of rupture, the sudden phenomenon of digital drag presents a vital moment for revealing the relationship among liveness, media, and citational reproduction in drag’s history.

Creating queer safe space: relational space-making at a grassroots LGBT pride event in Scotland

Queer safe space is commonly understood simply as space that is safe for queer people. In this paper we seek to develop a more nuanced conceptualisation of queer safe space attuned to how the process of creating space as simultaneously queer space and safe space can mean making compromises with both safety and queerness. Our research uses a case study of ‘Free Pride’ a grassroots LGBT Pride group in Glasgow, Scotland that sought to create a radical and inclusive event space, particularly for transgender people, but attracted controversy when it banned drag performers from the event, before reversing this decision. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the organizers of Free Pride, alongside online statements collected from those involved in the controversy, we show how the contradictions and complexities that arose from the group’s decision and its reversal highlights the contested political underpinnings of contemporary Pride events and the potentially fraught relations that can exist between certain identities within LGBT communities. Ultimately, Free Pride’s decision-making raised questions over how queer people relate to one another at Pride events, the inclusiveness of drag for trans identities, and the importance of seeing and being with one another in Pride spaces. We argue that although the process of queer space-making involved these complex and contradictory negotiations between safety and queerness, Free Pride ultimately created a queer safe space focused on queer collectivity.

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic

The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic

Dragging up the night: exploring the changing dynamic of audiences at drag events in the UK

ABSTRACT Herek (2002) states that the LGBTQ+ community travel to LGBTQ+ events to celebrate with like-minded people, free of prejudice and violence. These events create safe spaces where people can escape the realities of everyday life (Pritchard et al., 2000). Drag events, a staple of the LGBTQ+ community, were once identified as underground, taboo, and perverse events attended mainly by gay males. However, this art form has exploded over the last decade and gained undeniable acceptance and popularity, mainly due to RuPaul and RuPaul's Drag Race (Jordan, 2018). RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR) has been a catalyst that has ‘proliferated’ and ‘professionalised’ drag culture globally (LeMaster, 2015). With drag breaking boundaries, becoming a global phenomenon and being adopted by mainstream society, there has been an increase in live drag events across the UK. This paper explores this evolving audience dynamic from the perspective of drag performers, utilising a qualitative research approach through an online qualitative questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The data was collected from drag artists who have performed at drag events in the UK. The findings suggest that whilst RPDR has propelled drag culture into mainstream society, it has also narrowed the public perception of what ‘drag’ is. Drag events reach new audiences, supporting the LGBTQ+ community by creating safe spaces to celebrate all things queer. Performers have varying perceptions on this changing audience and what this might mean for the future of drag artists and drag events.