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
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section 1: The state of drag: At your own peril
Chapter 1 - The politics of drag
Leila J. Rupp, Verta Taylor, and Shae Miller
Chapter 2 - Super drags: Untucking the controversial cancellation of Brazil's first drag animation
Lucas Bragança
Chapter 3 - Drag as protected expression in law
Florian Kim Dayag
Chapter 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
Anne-Marie Korte
Chapter 5 - Embodying the illusion: Transcending and reconstituting the regulatory state through Singapore's drag scene.
Cheney Thomas Y. Yap and Orlando Woods
Chapter 6 - Perverting the nation: Resisting drag phobia in Sweden in the 21st century
Louise Wallenberg
Section 2: Drag activism: Changing times, changing lives
Chapter 7 - Pave the streets in lavender and red. Sharing the gossip: Understanding activist drag actions
Narzissa Helfritzsch
Chapter 8 - Drag and authoritarianism: The rhetoric and aesthetics of Drag Den as response to authoritarian rule
John Paolo Sarce
Chapter 9 - "Nothing's gonna stop us now": Drag activism in Austria
Yvonne Prinzellner
Chapter 10 - 'I would not be here [without drag]': Travis Alabanza's Tranifest, drag archives and promiscuous care practices
Elisabeth Massana
Chapter 11 - Guimpe-ing it up for the archive: the vestiary politics of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the United Kingdom
Nina Kane
Section 3: Histories: Of kings, queens and in-betweens
Chapter 12 - Against assimilation - A brief, but complex introduction to drag in Cape Town
Lindy-Lee Prince
Chapter 13 - 'Tassie Kings': drag king culture in regional spaces
Phoebe Adams, Sophie Keegan, Shan Hooper, and Kerryn Drysdale,
Chapter 14 - Queering Blackpool
Helen Eadon-Sinkinson
Chapter 15 -, Watching and joining ex-servicemen's drag revues in post-war Britain: Examining drag's status as a queer art form
Jacob Bloomfield
Chapter 16 - "Maintaining the illusion to overcome adversity": Drag performance and resilience in WWI camps
Carina Ehrnsperger
Chapter 17 - Con el poder de la transformación: Starring Freddie Bermejo. This is a putting on a show story about a show that never happened
Isabel Machado
Chapter 18 - Mollies and Tommies: Excavating the eighteenth-century history of drag
Nowell Marshall
Chapter 19 - "You would not have known her from a Woman": Cross-dressing men in eighteenth-century public spaces
Julie Gammon
Section 4: Drag epistemologies: It takes one to know one
Chapter 20 - The ivory tower as colonial house, ballroom, and runway: Academic drag, drag epistemology, and Critical Race Theory
Tommy Mayberry
Chapter 21 - Drag organic intellectuals: Notes towards an embodied trans* anarchism
Samu/elle Striewski
Chapter 22 - "I've got nothing but hampers of ironing to do and my diet pill is wearing off": Fat performativity in Divine's drag
Jonathan Graffam-O'Meara
Chapter 23 - Who dealt these cards? Gamifying drag as historiography for molly subcultures
McKenna James Boeckner
Chapter 24 - Drag in the Czech post-socialist context: Between straight mainstream and gay cultural fringe
Zdeněk Sloboda
Section 5: Bodies/post bodies: Werking beyond the wig.
Chapter 25 - Encountering the Fish and the Ogre: Unveiling political ambivalence in alternative drag performances in the Philippines
Ian Rafael Ramirez
Chapter 26 - (Re)Inventing the Self: Drag, posthumanism, and the collapse of human boundaries
Nick Cherryman
Chapter 27 - Dragging-up disability: Intersections of gender and disability in deaf drag performance
Looi van Kessel
Chapter 28 - Dragging Latinidad: Drag nightlife as Latinx excess.
David Tenorio
Section 6: Drag and postcolonialism: Anything but Blackface
Chapter 29 - "Can you get more American than Native American?": Drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul's Drag Race
Nishant Upadhyay
Chapter 30 - Inevitable face: the elegant opacity in the fabulation of masculinity
Angelica Adverse
Chapter 31 -Russian drag as practices of self-colonisation and decolonisation
Olga Andreevskikh
Section 7: Drag and Media: Watching me, watching you
Chapter 32 -Among Unicorns: Drag, queer activism and artistic production in the Middle East
Charlotte Bank
Chapter 33 - Censoring Huysuz: Drag on Turkish tv and Infringement of cultural expression
Serkan Kasapoğlu
Chapter 34 - Out of the bars and onto the screen: Drag in independent North American film of the 1970s
Cameron Crookston
Chapter 35 - Carry on drag: Cross-dressing and the queer legacies of the Carry On franchise
Simon Dodi
Chapter 36 - Drag and the Eurovision Song Contest in Central and Eastern Europe
Catherine Baker
Section 8: Drag as/and form: It's giving
Chapter 37 - Drag lyric / Lyric drag
Zosia Kuczyńska
Chapter 38 - The dramaturgy of drag / Drag as dramaturgy
Christian Lewis
Chapter 39 - Dragging the dishonourable gentleman: lip-synching England's C/conservative villains
Emma Welton
Chapter 40 - Dragging AI: Techno temporalities towards queer futures
Joe Parslow
Chapter 41 - Becoming versus imitation: The Zizi Show - A deepfake drag cabaret
Tengjin Bian
