Normative drag culture and the making of precarity

Abstract

Foundational scholars delimit drag performance as imprecise and exaggerated imitations of masculinities or femininities in a public forum, usually clubs or bars. The purpose of this paper is to show the ways that performativity operates within a normative (i.e., heavily policed, binary oriented) drag culture (i.e., Kings and Queens). I articulate how the discursive production of gender performance is relational and creates fleeting moments of hegemonic rupture, but, this leisure practice, as with all leisure practices, is both enacted by agentic bodies and heavily informed by the cultural scripts of binary oriented gender. Within this particular drag community, I show how the practice of gender subversive drag has been culturally seized as a weapon of transphobia.