Full Description
The Routledge Companion to Drag offers a comprehensive academic exploration of drag as a global, historical, and cultural phenomenon.
This volume examines drag beyond its popularised media image, tracing its diverse practices across time and geography. Chapters address key themes such as the history, herstory and thierstory of drag, its representation on television, activism, and performance traditions from the Victorian and Elizabethan stage to contemporary contexts. With contributions that extend beyond the global North, the book foregrounds intersectional perspectives on race, ethnicity, the body , class, and sexuality, while engaging with issues such as the AIDS pandemic and cultural politics. Rejecting uniformity, it embraces the complexity and multiplicity of drag cultures worldwide.
The Routledge Companion to Drag is ideal for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and Politics, this companion provides an essential resource for those seeking critical insights into modern and historical drag practices and its discourse.
Contents
Section 1: The state of drag: At Your Own Peril. 1. The politics of drag 2. Super drags: Untucking the controversial cancellation of Brazil's first drag animation 3. Drag as protected expression in law 4. "To combine Catholicity and being queer at the same time": Religious and gendered positioning in the controversial case of the Philippine drag Pura Luka Vega 5. Embodying the illusion: Transcending and reconstituting the regulatory state through Singapore's drag scene. 6. Perverting the nation: Resisting drag phobia in Sweden in the 21st century Section 2: Drag activism: Changing times, changing lives 7. Pave the streets in lavender and red. Sharing the gossip: Understanding activist drag actions 8. Drag and authoritarianism: The rhetoric and aesthetics of Drag Den as response to authoritarian rule 9. "Nothing's gonna stop us now": Drag activism in Austria 10. 'I would not be here [without drag]': Travis Alabanza's Tranifest, drag archives and promiscuous care practices 11. Guimpe-ing it up for the archive: the vestiary politics of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the United Kingdom Section 3: Histories: Of kings, queens and in-betweens 12. Against assimilation - A brief, but complex introduction to drag in Cape Town 13. 'Tassie Kings': drag king culture in regional spaces 14. Queering Blackpool. 15. Watching and joining ex-servicemen's drag revues in post-war Britain: Examining drag's status as a queer art form 16. "Maintaining the illusion to overcome adversity": Drag performance and resilience in WWI camps 17. Con el poder de la transformación: Starring Freddie Bermejo. This is a putting on a show story about a show that never happened 18. Mollies and Tommies: Excavating the eighteenth-century history of drag 19."You would not have known her from a Woman": Cross-dressing men in eighteenth-century public spaces Section 4: Drag epistemologies: It takes one to know one 20. The ivory tower as colonial house, ballroom, and runway: Academic drag, drag epistemology, and Critical Race Theory 21. Drag organic intellectuals: Notes towards an embodied trans* anarchism 22. "I've got nothing but hampers of ironing to do and my diet pill is wearing off": Fat performativity in Divine's drag 23. Who dealt these cards? Gamifying drag as historiography for molly subcultures 24. Drag in the Czech post-socialist context: Between straight mainstream and gay cultural fringe Section 5: Bodies/post bodies: Werking beyond the wig. 25. Encountering the Fish and the Ogre: Unveiling political ambivalence in alternative drag performances in the Philippines 26. (Re)Inventing the Self: Drag, posthumanism, and the collapse of human boundaries 27. Dragging-up disability: Intersections of gender and disability in deaf drag performance 28. Dragging Latinidad: Drag nightlife as Latinx excess. Section 6: Drag and postcolonialism: Anything but Blackface 29. "Can you get more American than Native American?": Drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul's Drag Race 30. Inevitable face: the elegant opacity in the fabulation of masculinity 31. Russian drag as practices of self-colonisation and decolonisation Section 7: Drag and Media: Watching me, watching you 32. Among Unicorns: Drag, queer activism and artistic production in the Middle East 33. Censoring Huysuz: Drag on Turkish tv and Infringement of cultural expression 34. Out of the bars and onto the screen: Drag in independent North American film of the 1970s 35. Carry on drag: Cross-dressing and the queer legacies of the Carry On franchise 36. Drag and the Eurovision Song Contest in Central and Eastern Europe Section 8: Drag as/and form: It's giving 37. Drag lyric / Lyric drag 38. The dramaturgy of drag / Drag as dramaturgy 39. Dragging the dishonourable gentleman: lip-synching England's C/conservative villains 40. Dragging AI: Techno temporalities towards queer futures 41. Becoming versus imitation: The Zizi Show - A deepfake drag cabaret
