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Drag + Service Learning

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YOUR STORY

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In person or virtual
Experiential Drag Storytelling

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1 BOOK & LOOK

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Go towards honorariums

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Costuming, participants can team up and help each other find clothing & supplies
Make-up
Wigs

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10-15 storytelling performances
Drop-in drag

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The Drag Academy is a collective of local drag performers. The Academy is designed to elevate Drag as an artform. Members of the collective share their expertise in immersive courses. The course is designed for those with zero experience with drag to those who have been in the industry for years.

DRAG ACADEMY PODCAST

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The Drag Academy is a collective of local drag performers. The Academy is designed to elevate Drag as an artform. Members of the collective share their expertise in immersive courses. The course is designed for those with zero experience with drag to those who have been in the industry for years.

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Featuring drag artistry around the country, locally

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INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR ARTS & TECHNOLOGY

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INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR ARTS & TECHNOLOGY

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icoaat | Vancouver's Literary Makerspace! Home of the New Dominion Reading Series and The Syntax Gallery.

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All things literary and text based. Storytelling with Drag Queens Foundation, New Dominion Reading Series, Syntax Gallery, Book Club, Video Game Nights + more!…

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“Job Description” & commitment

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Drag is art, and it's important to queer history

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by Alex Masse, Peak Associate
It's LGBT History Month . For many, the history of the queer community is marked by a small number of major events, like the Stonewall riots , the AIDS epidemic , and the legalization of gay marriage in and . But queer history is much more expansive than that, and continues to grow. Few touchstones of queer culture seem as controversial as drag - even in our own community. Somehow, the art form is simultaneously alive and well, yet horribly misunderstood by most of the cisgender heterosexual population, and even some queer folks themselves, because they only know it as a homophobic or transphobic punchline.

When most people conjure up a mental image of drag, it's pretty specific: a cis queer man dolled up in an exaggerated caricature of a woman, with six-inch heels and eyeliner that could cut you in half. Besides that, they'll probably think of RuPaul's Drag Race , the hit reality competition TV series. While there's no doubt is revolutionary in some ways, it's not without its flaws. This show has led to drag itself being scapegoated. People see and assume the whole art form begins and ends with cis men, as if drag isn't a complex spectrum of gender performance.

But drag has a long and diverse history - one which is often overlooked. If we go back to Stonewall, drag can be seen in its key figures. Drag is in Marsha P. Johnson, a trans woman who also identified as a , and in Stormé DeLarverie , a "male impersonator," or more accurately, a 20 th century drag king. At the time, identities were more fluid, and while some of the language is antiquated, the fact is gender as performance has always been alive and well, and not just for cis men.

Much of drag's diverse and storied history has been recorded, especially through film. The Queen for example, is a documentary covering a 1967 drag pageant. It's a gem in its own right for existing as a pre-Stonewall and pre-AIDS snapshot of queer life.

While pageant culture was not without flaws - most notably favouritism for white competitors - it laid the foundation for drag culture, where queer people of colour made their own safe space. This is where much of drag as we know it today was born, and where a certain RuPaul Charles got his .

Another great film is 1990's Paris is Burning , which shows the true complexity of drag as a performance, and how diverse it can really be, with many of the leading figures in the documentary being trans women. It also focused on the struggle of being queer and in poverty at the peak of the AIDS crisis.

Finally, thoug h in no small part thanks to these shows, drag is being recognized as queer art. Many would describe it as elaborate or exaggerated gender expression, and what's queerer than making gender itself your plaything? You can be a boy dressed as a girl, or a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed like a girl dressed as a boy, or be genderless and wear multiple genders at once.

And that's not even getting into the effort that goes into drag. You need clothes, you need makeup, you often need wigs, and you also need to perform - be that singing, dancing, or even stand-up comedy. Denying it as an art form is like denying makeup or fashion design as a part of the performing arts.

If this is all news to you, maybe you should explore drag a bit. Look into the films and TV shows mentioned, catch a local performance in Vancouver's drag scene (one that's socially distanced, of course), and maybe even give it a shot yourself. With everything it's done for the community, drag deserves to be given an open-minded approach. Rather than dismissing what you've been exposed to, dive into the colourful art and honour its queer history. You never know - you might love it!

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Drag is art, and it's important to queer history

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by Alex Masse, Peak Associate It's LGBT History Month. For many, the history of the queer community is marked by a small number of major events, like the Stonewall riots, the AIDS epidemic, and the legalization of gay marriage in America and Canada. But queer history is much more expansive than that, and continues to...

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Normative drag culture and the making of precarity

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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.

"A couple of Queens had made comments that Kings were showing their tape and that it ruined the illusion. And then everybody got into it on Facebook, and there was this big back and forth of vague Facebook statuses that were made. I just stayed out of it cause I was like 'I'm not going anywhere near that.' You don't need to put it on social networking like Facebook where everyone sees it and then questions themselves and questions what they're going to do". (Pretty Boi)

"All this gender-bending and gender fuck and everything are, whether they're accepted or not, they're I think a challenge to those socialised norms within the drag community just as much as trans people initially, or genderqueer or gender non-conforming adults in the non-drag community do on a daily basis". (Divine)

Introduction

Foundational scholars who wrote about drag King and Queen performance delimit these queer acts as imprecise and exaggerated imitations of masculinities or femininities that take place in a public forum, usually in clubs or bars (Butler, ; Halberstam, ). For individuals who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) or assigned male at birth (AMAB), drag has traditionally been and can continue to be, a context to perform an oppositional gender (Murray, ) through acts of illusion that insist the outward appearance does not align with the inner self and body (Newton, ).

However, many drag contexts challenge these aforementioned binary presentations of drag. Some examples include the offensively named 'bioqueens' (cisgender women who claim to be 'real' women and perform as drag Queens), transgender or genderqueer people performing as Queens or Kings, and transgender, genderqueer and cisgender people performing genderfuck (e.g., using sparkly beards to queer masculinity, or a combination of beards and skirts). Drag artists perform renditions of gender that have multiple and varied meanings for the artist and audience (Rupp et al., ). For example, Halberstam () writes of the drag King performer who:

can be male or female; she can be transgender; she can be butch or femme. The drag king might make no distinction between her off-stage and on-stage persona, or she may make an absolute distinction; she may say that on- and off-stage personae bleed into each other in unpredictable and even uncontrollable ways. The drag king may be extremely self-conscious about her performance and may have elaborate justifications and theories about what she is doing, or she may just think of her act as "having fun" and make no further claims for it. (p. 104)

Within the performance, gender categories of the everyday are challenged by artists who intentionally sculpt a gender and production that creates gender difference. To further explain, the drag artist, by producing a gender expression (e.g., dress, mannerisms) that does not match what is expected, contests the notion that several axes of gender, including sex assigned at birth, gender expression, gender identity, and sexuality are congruent (e.g., at once assigned female at birth, with feminine expression, identify as a woman and heterosexual). In fact, as Butler () notes, the reason why audiences take so much pleasure and joy in consuming all types of drag is that the performance illuminates quite clearly that the everyday normative gender framework is shown to be fabricated. A drag artist shows the axes not in alignment, and as such, they are made to be visible (e.g., at once assigned female at birth, with masculine expression, identify as nonbinary and queer). As such, drag performance is an embodied practice, an act that often succeeds at contesting the natural boundedness of culturally understood everyday gender through the deviance of body presentation and behaviour and by playing with binary oriented conformity (Hanson, ). Many renditions of drag (e.g., white drag Kings) rupture and differentiate the axis of gender because the imitative gender performance is theatrical, slightly imperfect, and campy (or so extreme as to be amusing) in ways that intentionally mock the gender framework (Moore, ). As Halberstam () explains, in everyday culture, cisgender male identity and masculine expression are ultimately fused and heavily policed to remain unseen through violence and harassment - and this is what makes all types of drag subversive. Rupp et al. () also maintain that Queen and King culture trouble hegemonic gender, sexuality and desire. For example, Queens challenge hegemonic masculinity through their expressions of femininity, and Kings through their presentation of gender fluidity and non-normative gender. However, the performed body signifies deviance or conformity according to local cultural scripts of how to interpret a particular body's expression of gender. In this way, Hoogland () suggests that bodies are 'plastic' because social norms of gender fluctuate, and signifiers are temporally and geographically understood. Further, scholars point out that, in addition to being a subversive or conformist gender practice, drag performance can perpetuate oppressions such as misogyny and racism (e.g., McNeal, )

Background

Everyday gender and drag performance

Judith Butler () suggests that gender is performative; that is, gender is not something that one 'is,' rather, it is an identity that one 'does.' This doing is enacted through expression and acts of repetition that work together to produce certain realities (i.e., read by observers as male or female). We enter this cyclically produced gender framework at birth already acted upon; we are the effects, rather than the causes, of discourse (Butler, ). Nelson () outlines that Butler's most important theoretical contribution is the unpacking of what appears to be natural, illustrating that gender is fictive and 'something that is done over and over instead of something that is an inherent characteristic' (p. 339).

For everyday gender, 'acting and then becoming' does not necessarily preclude choice, but agency occurs almost accidentally and spontaneously, without fully knowing how gender acts upon us. Personal choice is negotiated from within the confines of social norms that encourage accurate imitations of an acceptable gender (Butler, ). Related to this point, scholars have critiqued Butler's ontology of this supposedly agentless subject, meaning that performativity described as repetitive imitation denotes a framework somewhat frozen in time, with discursive effects of imposed identity-making and an entirely abstracted subject (for example, isolated from one's context, personal history, or desire). By emphasising repetition as how identity is assured, Nelson () claims that Butler () sets up an inescapable dichotomy between the fully autonomous subject capable of conscious action and discourses of sex and gender that are so ultimately compelling they seem to be inescapable. Therefore, to find intentional ruptures and change, we must move beyond an unrelenting framework that works on unconscious doing subjects. As such, rather than describing the productivity of the gender framework through repetition, we can insist that gender is performed relationally.

All drag performances are understood within the particular context in which they are practiced and against contextual rules that create boundedness for the performance. The felt experience of the performer, therefore, is made possible by the social response and meaning-making of the audience (Hanson, ). Drag performers and drag performances are interpreted based on the embodied difference between read sex assigned at birth and gender expression through the minutiae of the 'perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical' (West & Fenstermaker, , p. 9). For many audiences that consume drag, there is desire, attraction, and a physical thirst for these non-normative gender expressions and identities. Drag performers who can illustrate the fictive nature of normative gender by mocking the gender framework are often granted a celebrity-like status (Rupp et al., ).

Drag culture and performance

In contrast, these same scholars show that while many Kings had a masculine identity (e.g., butch) before performing in a drag troupe, the performance often influenced self-understandings. King performances, music choices, and movement were also more likely to be intentionally shaped by feminism and queer theory, prioritising presentations of the fluidity and non-normativity of gender rather than necessarily presenting hyper-masculinity. The attraction to perform as a King was often to seek out queer community, spend time with friends who were already Kinging, and for the allure of the performance itself (Rupp et al., ).

Other scholars who have studied drag culture have shown that Kings felt sexually attractive and confident, and accessed masculine parts of the self or embodied masculinity and aggression in ways that were empowering and then spilled over into everyday life (Halberstam, ; Hanson, ; Shapiro, ). Previous work has also shown that while both Kings and Queens act to provoke desire and fantasy in audience members, Queens often endorsed a literal 'hands-on' entitlement to the attention of the crowd. In contrast, Kings cultivated audience desire through more indirect elicitation, such as eye contact and dance moves (Horowitz, ). Both cultures work to elicit queer cravings within queer and straight-identified audience members through entertainment spectacles.

However, despite the clear role that erotic desire plays in the performance-audience relationship, the intentional mockery of normative gender is often overwhelmingly central. For example, some AFAB drag King performers who medically, legally, and socially transitioned to a male identity stopped doing drag because they feel like they were making fun of themselves by performing as a drag King (Berbary & Johnson, ). However, there is more to drag than a deep desire to make a mockery of gender for its own sake. As I will illustrate throughout this paper, insisting that drag is only a mockery of gender has some problematic implications. For example, the act of a cisgender woman performing masculine drag, cannot, and must not, solely be a mockery of gender because it contests what Butler () has so carefully shown to be an assumed natural order. As Hanson () states, 'female embodied masculinity should be regarded to be as equally "real" as any other embod[iment]' (p. 79). Female masculinity in the drag context may be seen as a mockery of gender because female or genderqueer masculinities in the everyday performance of gender is often 'framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing' (Halberstam, , p. 1). The drag context, therefore, must be an opportunity to create and express equally real versions of gender if it is to destabilise everyday gender. Any performance, however, must be both informed by, and contest, cultural scripts of gender. For example, were

drag Kings to ... completely repudiate Western culture's and their own reality of what it means to be a female in our society, there would be no tension ... and 'without tension, there would be [none of Butler's] pleasure' - hence, the tantalizing paradox of the experience and meaningfulness of drag embodiment as both conformist and subversive. (Cavallaro & Warwick, , p. 95)

Drag performance as agency and oppression

Scholars have revealed drag to be a potential site of intentional political activism and resistance through visible representations of subversive and queer genders that challenge normativity through the spectacle of queer desire (Barnett & Johnson, ; Shapiro, ). Drag can also be an opportunity to call out misogyny, patriarchy, and racism through audience-performer dialogue (Rupp et al., ). Performance and drag culture, however, are not necessarily activist-oriented (Horowitz, ). As Butler () notes, it should not be news that any attempt to rewrite gender norms risks reifying the naturalised framework and oppressions. For example, drag Queens can provoke laughter at what society mocks them for, namely their sexuality and feminine gender expression. However, this production of humour, claims McNeal () in his psychoanalytic analysis, is a thinly disguised self-hate that manifests as misogyny. This scholar proposes that the anger of experiencing harassment for feminine expression in everyday life is then channelled on stage through exaggerated femininity, coupled with misogyny, through a cathartic group experience. Berbary and Johnson () eloquently point this out in their interviews with drag Kings and Queens:

Clear from above is that drag performance and drag culture are productive in many ways, including social change and hegemonic continuity. For example, drag performance can be a narrowly conceived gender expression that is heavily surveilled. This influences how drag bodies are sculpted, the environment within which the performance takes place, the artist-audience relationship, and everyday gender.

In this paper, I show the productivity of Butler's performativity within a particular drag culture, noting the limitations of performativity as repetition. As Nelson () writes: 'human subjects, located in time and space, do identities in much more complex ways than performativity allows' (p. 348), including through actions of agency and reification. Horowitz () calls on scholars to trouble performativity as an iterative production and suggests instead to frame how performativity operates relationally, mainly through the central role of desire. A relationally based performativity allows me to explore the discursive effect of performativity with knowing subjects who create contextualised meaning from their experiences. As such, within the analysis I work to understand the individuals who participated in this study as knowers and agents within the production of the performance, as situated subjects who articulate normative and subversive identities, perhaps simultaneously, as well as break down and perpetuate oppressions. In particular, my purpose here is to extend the scholarly conversation on drag performance to include an interrogation of how transphobia, trans exclusion and cisgender privilege function within normative drag culture.

Methods and methodology

The drag institution I studied is particular to one city and was described by my interviewees as predominately under forty, white, and middle class. Through a convenience style of sampling, I interviewed artists and community members associated with a drag mentorship project. Five individuals, for whom I provide pseudonyms, participated in a single interview: Dolly Hardon and Divine (white cisgender gay men with over five years of drag queen performance experience each); Sham Payne (person of colour) and Pretty Boi (white), both genderqueer drag King performers with two and five years of drag performance experience each; and Sarah (white transgender woman with no drag experience), a community member who insisted on being interviewed because she heard about the project and wanted to voice her critical perspective. My positionality includes that I am a middle-aged white genderqueer researcher with a short history in drag King performance.

All artists participated in either face to face or over the phone semi-structured interviews between one hour and 90 minutes that were digitally audio recorded. Participants responded to an interview guide that used open-ended questions and a conversation style to strive for in-depth storytelling. I produced the interview guide with the express purpose of helping all of us reflect critically on the local drag performance and drag culture. I asked, why and how did you participate in drag performance and drag culture? What did this performance mean to you and the audience members? How is drag political? Apolitical?

The interviews were a collaborative dialogue with participants, and I freely shared my musings and observations. I asked participants for their responses to my thoughts and experiences as a way to increase the trustworthiness of the data and create a reflexive practice. Within this reflexive practise was an opportunity to alter or sustain discourses of drag or engage in agency and reproduction (Alcoff, ). Each interview, therefore, was a joint production of stories, incidences, and contemplations

As human subjectivities are diverse, I did not seek to represent a cohesive narrative of the data. Instead, I worked to undertake an analysis and representation that would move the conversation about drag and drag performance in new directions. Although many of my interviews spoke passionately and insisted on the import of their words, it is I, in the end, who gave weight and presence to the themes below. Within this paradigmatic stance, I must outline a scope of validity that does not inherently rely on confirming the existence of a singular notion of truth (Lather, ), but undertake what Woolgar () calls a 'reflexive exploration.' Rather than this work being validified, it is legitimised by its contribution to 'an "unjam-ming" effect in relation to the closed truths of the past, thereby freeing up the present for new forms of thought and practice' (Bennett, , p. 277). It is with this in mind that I present the findings as a way to extend the conversation and ways of thinking about drag culture and performance.

Findings

Below I argue that this particular drag culture is normative, not necessarily due to the emphasis on binary oriented drag performance (i.e., heavily sculpted King and Queen performance), but the insistence on narrow versions of gender performance to the exclusion of artists who did not conform. Conformity was enforced by Queens who had the most cultural capital (i.e., the ones who got the most gigs, won the most prizes, and held positions in the Imperial Court System - an annual competition whose winner(s) are the face of the local drag scene and fundraise for local organisations). These Queens were consistently asked to judge drag performances and openly shared their opinions on the local drag performance Facebook page. Their opinions mattered, their style of drag emulated (but not too closely), and they influenced an artist's ability to get future gigs at local bars and events. Below I articulate how this drag culture facilitates normativity through a relational drag practice, the implications for drag culture and everyday gender (e.g., transmisogyny), and how straight culture consumes and realises this normativity.

Drag as a normative relational practice

Within this community, the satirical illusion of performance was an opportunity to get attention through an amplified presentation of the feminine or masculine. We: 'take that epitome of what it is supposed to be a woman and try to shine a very bright light on it in a way' (Divine). Divine recognised the purpose of this illusion as predominately for amusement: 'I would view it more as entertainment than pushing any kind of gender boundaries or societal norms.' The goal of the artists in this particular drag community was to create an imitation or parody of gender as a Queen or King on stage:

all my impersonations are called 'esque' because I don't look like Marilyn Munroe, but if you have the blond hair and the pink dress, you're Marilyn right. I do Dolly, but I don't look like Dolly Parton, but if you've got big boobs and big hair, you're Dolly (Dolly Hardon).

and

If I just kind of look like Elvis and I'm performing an Elvis song, the audience is immediately already caught up in Elvis so I can wiggle my hips a little bit, and it's fine, and people are going to lose their minds. It's not about me, it's about Elvis (Sham Payne).

While these characters were 'esque,' that is they were a likeness but not really Dolly or Elvis, there were still unspoken and openly policed rules of behaviour about how this gender mismatch can materialise. Queens 'look for polish; you know, are your arms shaved? You better have nails on. If you have [on] open-toed shoes and pantyhose, I'm throwing my drink at you' (Dolly Hardon). Artists paid 'attention to detail, built a brand,' and if perfection could not be achieved, 'I'm staying the hell home' (Dolly Hardon). The code of practice included the expectation that drag Queens will perform late, even on weekdays, consume alcohol and drugs, use the common vernacular (e.g., hey girl!) and adhere to perfection:

there is this social expectation within the gay community, or the queer community that drag Queens will present as these hyper-feminized women, and as soon as you see a drag Queen who gets up and is a little clumsy or is a little more masculine, you clock them right away for it because they're not draggy enough, they're not feminine enough. So, I think we almost perpetuated in and of ourselves. God forbid you don't wear boobs, or you wear flat shoes, or you have short hair. There are these internalized expectations within the drag community of what drag expression is or what the gender expression for a drag Queen is (Divine).

Kings were also held to specific standards of performance and expression. At judged events where Kings and Queens performed in the same venue, there was little tolerance for playing with, bending, or restyling the artistry. At one such event, 'a couple of Queens had made comments that Kings were showing their tape [that was used to bind their breasts] and said that it ruined the illusion' (Pretty Boi). Previous research shows that King cultures typically have more flexibility around performing many forms of masculine genders (Rupp et al., ) and there is a similar sentiment in this particular locale, where Kings are beginning to flagrantly play with the illusion, by intentionally opening up shirts to show tape. However, the Queens in this community responded negatively to visible tape because they are 'holding tighter to the [King and Queen] gender binary' (Pretty Boi) and 'there's this perpetuation of what a King is and that drag has to be a certain way' (Sham Payne). This need for the perfect illusion infuses all aspects of presentation, especially make-up application. In my interview with Dolly Hardon, we were planning a session to show young queer people how to do drag make up, in particular, discussing how to paint one face as a demo. I offered to sit in on the session and have her do my face so that the youth could see the process as it unfolded, but she was quite reluctant. Finally, she agreed, on a condition that she so very carefully stated: 'just ... be shaved'. Her reluctance to paint my face stemmed from my everyday presentation of genderqueerness and hairy chin, a presentation that, if not dealt with, would not make for an easy, nor perfect, make up application. Divine articulated that the drag process necessarily begins with a so-called blank canvas:

The first steps are removing all outward presentations of your existing gender; we're kind of starting from square one. You know we've all taped things down, backed things in, covered things over, and now we're all starting from this androgynous state and then we kind of go from there. So, I think we can relate [King and Queen] stories together in that way in that we all kind of de-drag ourselves from our normal gender presentations, and then we re-drag ourselves to go out and present.

Butler () would contest this notion of a blank canvas as if the artist begins from nothing. She would insist that there is no place that culture does not reach, that there is no mind/body divide, no pause in the absorption of culture; there is only inscription on body-minds. This inscription means that what is typically thought of as our internal, private, and uninfluenced terrain, such as gender identity or inner character, is as much a cultural product as gender expression. This does not mean that gender identity is not visceral, experienced, or felt, but that the possibilities for what might be considered as transgressing gender, such as drag performance, are influenced by the pre-discursive limitations of the binary orientated gender framework. Drag Kinging and Queening, therefore, is both a subversive practice and identity, as well as necessarily limited in scope. In this community, it was an expectation that artists intentionally perform to a stylised binary perfection.

There's someone who is fairly new who came out for a pageant, and they were really incredible. They played femininity in a different way, like your sassy, not well put together drunk aunt, that was what it conjured up for me. So, it was during a pageant and one of the judges, you know when they did the thing around what are you looking to see in the Queens, one of the judges was like I just want to see a handbag, I love handbags, so if you've got something back there, bring it out. She didn't have a handbag with her but brought out her plastic grocery bag and sort of played on like yah this is what I've got. Her whole aesthetic wasn't that high glam (Sham Payne).

Although performing a gender difference that was 'incredible,' without receiving the accolades of the other Queens, being invited into the social circles of other drag performers, or put on the billfold of other gigs, performers that stray from norms make only a brief or occasional appearance on the scene. Having a drag mom (a mentor) plays a pivotal role in the success of Queens, but: 'I've heard some Queens say that they don't adopt someone unless they've won a title. It's like all my kids are titleholders' (Sham Payne).

Normative drag perpetuates transmisogyny and cisgender privilege

While drag performers often signal another gender that is different from their everyday gender, the performance of drag and being transgender or genderqueer were not the same thing, although, similar to what previous scholars have ascertained, some artists used drag as a space of self-exploration that culminated in transition to another everyday gender identity. In this community, transgender men who used drag as a way to explore gender identity and then socially, legally, and medically transitioned often decided to walk away from performance all together because they felt as though they were mocking themselves. Sarah outlined that if a transgender person should do drag in a gender that aligns with their gender identity (for example, a transgender woman performing as a drag Queen): 'talk about undermining our own message.' Because the goal of normative drag (that is, cisgender artists who perform an oppositional gender to the active exclusion of gender multiplicity) is to transgressively illuminate the axis of gender, Sarah shared that normative drag Queen performance and culture: 'doesn't include, trans women and it can't answer the question of what drag looks like for us that doesn't undermine our gender, doesn't re-establish us as men, doesn't provoke our own dysphoria, profoundly.' Normative drag culture seeks to make visible the axis of gender, to actively mock this visibility. However, for Sarah, erasing the visibility of sex assigned at birth, gender expression, and gender identity is to be recognisable as a cisgender woman, would allow her to live at the centre in her everyday life, and, for example, earn a living. Butler () explains Sarah's lack of recognition, worthiness and personhood as precarity, a vulnerable non-existence that increases exposure to food and housing insecurity, physical injury, and even death.

Normative drag then is 'not a form that includes, trans women, and it's as much parodying us and perpetuating those things which marginalise us' (Sarah). Just as the drag Queens in Rupp et al. () study who constantly joked about their large clitoris's, normative drag Queens actively mock the alignment of sex assigned at birth, gender expression, and gender identity, to show that multiple axes of gender exist, are imperfect, or queer. However, what this 'joke' also does is publicly proclaim that 'of course drag Queens are not real women because real women don't have penises.' But, some women and transgender women do have penises because sex organs do not determine gender (Kessler, ). This joke, therefore, is an act of cisgender privilege and transgender exclusion rather than just a mockery of the everyday gender framework. The then heralded drag artist gains social, cultural, and economic capital in the queer community and yet does not have to live in the same day to day microaggressions, physical violence, and turmoil of living at the margins as transwomen do: 'the privilege of drag is you already have your gender and your identity that's accepted and in place in the community' (Sarah). Normative drag culture, therefore, simultaneously unpacks and reinforces everyday gender normativity in ways that are not always benign. As Hanson () notes, in the contestation of everyday binary identities, and within constructions of performance, it is just other rigid forms of gender that are produced. As such, the making and reproduction of these gender alternatives are not, as Butler () explains, 'outside' of discourse, 'natural' or 'pre-discursive' and therefore cannot stand for truth or goodness. Despite this, normative Queens in this community had all the 'opportunities to be on stage' (Pretty Boi). Exclusion from this drag culture meant that one transgender community member had no access to the economic capital garnered from the performance, nor the endearment and sexualised response from the audience: 'and so it's another little side gig that a cisgender person can do and be cool and meanwhile I've got to fucking pay the price of admission, which I usually can't afford. That's the reality' (Sarah). Even when drag artists are explicitly activist within their performance, for example, choosing a song or story to perform with goals of social justice, the forces of social and economic capital worked to exclude the most marginalised queer citizens.

Drag race, straight culture, and the everyday performance of gender

Drag Queens have played and continue to play a visible role in bridging gay culture and the surrounding community, for example, through the annual pride parade. For some interviewees, there was the perception that the annual pride celebrations had recently become more inclusive of straight communities and families who are coming out to watch the pride parade. Many artists described this change and seemingly increased acceptance of drag as an opportunity to share queer culture, expand the horizons of the viewing audience, and garner acceptance: 'this integration is a good thing because it increases nonqueer identified people's exposure to another aspect of queer culture. You don't have to be gay to be intrigued by drag Queens' (Pretty Boi).

Artists attributed increased visibility to the success of RuPaul's Drag Race, which was credited with influencing broader cultural knowledge about and seeming acceptance of drag Queens. Drag Race has had the effect of inserting what was once a subculture into mainstream pop culture, with myriad consequences. Queens in this community felt more comfortable presenting their drag in public while engaging in day to day activities, like grocery shopping, because their gender was recognised and attributed star-like status. The increased exposure also influenced 'expectations around what these [straight] communities want to see [at pride]. And so, it's almost like the general public's expectations keep pigeon-holing drag Queens to do the same thing' (Divine). These expectations have also intensified:

When I first started, I look back at pictures of myself, and I was like, 'did I have any make-up on'? The extreme contouring, now the face has changed, the way it's applied. I used to be able to do my make-up in an hour. Now it's like an hour and a half because you got to, there's just more, and you're really painting outside the lines, and it's like the volume is turned up, cause I mean drag is like turning up the volume on femininity sky high and now it's like in hyper-space (Dolly Hardon).

Drag Race was viewed by participants to have influenced drag culture through a privileging of professionalised drag Queens; a heightened expectation of the performance of thin bodies and almost perfect, yet still campy, gender imitations. The show was seen to influence a cultural recognition of this type of drag as a particular kind of gender identity that all people who queer gender in the everyday (and not just in performance) should strive. For Sarah, this increased influence and visibility of the professionalised drag Queen included negative consequences of experiencing increased transmisogyny, the aggressive targeting of transgender femininity as vain and not real, through the bulk of the attention, fetishisation, and violence in the trans community (Serano, ):

every Pride season, it gets more and more oppressive because that's when rural [people] come to the city to look at the queers. They all think I'm a drag Queen, and they all think I'm bad at it because I'm not high femme. I find my lack of attention to the details that would have me regarded as a cisgender woman is an obstacle to my inclusion among trans women my own age and this [queer] community, and I think that it comes very much from [drag] culture (Sarah).

Drag Race perpetuates the drag context as solely a mockery of the gender framework, through explicit and persistent, trans exclusion. For example, the show continually highlights the juxtaposition of performers in everyday dress and drag. Rupaul uses constant repetition to name the contestants as cisgender men to prove cisgender identities and show that drag is a performed identity that is oppositional to everyday presentation: 'gentlemen, start your engines ... and may the best woman win' [emphasis added]) (Moore, ). The show has also further perpetuated Queens as natural leaders and spokespeople within and for the queer community, in part by explicitly excluding drag King performers from participating.

Drag is a particular gender presentation and identity that makes clear that gender expression, gender identity, and sex assigned at birth, are differentiated, yet beautifully and theatrically so. Post Drag Race, professionalised normative drag culture influences transgender women being read as is in drag (look at her large clitoris!), yet poorly performing. If there is a failure on the part of the transgender person to pass as cisgender, and also a failure to adhere to a gender perceived as drag, the transgender person is thus read as a failed drag artist rather than read as transgender or genderqueer because there is currently little cultural imagination for these identities. Therefore, the culturally understood identity of the drag artist becomes a mechanism through which transgender people are policed: 'people think that I am just a bad drag Queen' (Sarah). For Butler (), the pre-discursive effect of the gender framework is that the possibilities for transgender and genderqueer identities are influenced by the cultural imagination of the public and what it means to be read as having a gender expression that does not align with sex assigned at birth - it means you are a drag artist.

Conclusion

Drag performance as a leisure practise is sculpted by the micro-politics of a locale that determines how gender can be embodied in the everyday and on stage. The leisure space within which the drag performances occurred (queer bars) was ostensibly a safer space for all queer people to gather, build social ties, create community, express and be affirmed in gender and sexuality (Lewis & Johnson, ). However, scholars have argued that the gay bar mobilises only a certain kind of visibility and recognition of queer identities to the outside world and that the gay bar is used, coded, and experienced differently by various patron groups. As Skeggs () showed, queer space was occupied by gay men to be noticed by other gay men, by white straight women not to be noticed by straight men, and by lesbian women, whose discomfort about the presence of straight women was noticeable. Taylor () argued that the capitalist and commercialised space of the gay bar influenced social norms and acceptable appearances (the 'right' hair, the 'right' clothes) in ways that actively and subtlety excluded working-class lesbians, which denied them a sense of belonging. Lisa Duggan () coined the term homonormativity to name these social norms of consumerism, individualism, and sexual relations that mirror heteronormativity (e.g., monogamy). Taken all together, Browne and Bakshi () argue that the queer community is not a homogenous group that shares a singular experience at the bar. Nor are these communities 'characterized by an absence of power relations or social and political hierarchies. Instead, homonormativity can be read as structuring the relations amongst LGBT people, marginalizing certain groups and individuals' (p. 182). Therefore, there is no certainty in queer spaces that subversion will be present, even as scholars have articulated drag is inherently subversive (e.g., Rupp et al., ). As Butler () states, 'there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms' (p. 125).

To conclude, even though my work and the work of other scholars show that drag is, in some cases, a journey to another identity, and historically drag performance has been an essential and safe venue for transgender and genderqueer people, I must be clear: to be in drag is not necessarily to be transgender or genderqueer and to be transgender is not to be in drag. However, there is a public imaginary influenced by Drag Race that associates transgender expressions and identities with professionalised notions of drag. Equating drag and transgender identities "misconstrues what gender expression is for many [trans] people in their everyday lives " (Sarah). In the everyday, there must be the possibility that imperfect or nonbinary gender expression is not intended to be a mockery of normative gender and that this expression should be considered a real gender identity - as real as any other binary oriented everyday or drag performance identity.

Drag performance is often an opportunity to counter hegemony, express joy about a gender identity that feels real, or an attempt to align the doing and being of gender. It is, therefore, not the practice of drag performance that is necessarily inherently transphobic and transmisogynist. Problematic are drag cultures and cisgender men who perform as drag Queens that lay a possessive claim to a singular professionalised notion of drag, who make visible the axis of gender through transphobic mockery, as well as a public that fetishises drag identities as a public spectacle of allyship.

Acknowledgments

Research assistants Robyn Burns and Rachele Mannett

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and the Humanities Council (SSHRC)

Notes on contributors

Fenton Litwiller is working on a project using gender play and drag performance to explore gender with 2SLGBTQ youth.

1. At birth, each person is assigned a binary sex (female or male)

2. A person whose gender identity (internal sense of gender) aligns with binary oriented sex assigned at birth (e.g., identify as a women and assigned female at birth)

3. For the purpose of this paper I use transgender to mean people who have a gender identity that does not align with binary oriented sex assigned at birth and genderqueer to mean individuals who do not identify with a binary gender (man/woman)

4. feelings of difference, distress, discord, or discomfort related to one's body due to misgendering, discrimination, and harassment faced in the public sphere (Schulz, ).

References

, & (2013). We are all royalty: Narrative comparison of a drag Queen and King. Journal of Leisure Research, 45(5), 677. https://doi.org/10.18666/jlr-2013-v45-i5-4369

(2011). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routlege. doi:10.4324/9780203828274

(2002). The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neolibralism. In Castronovo, R. & (eds.). Materializing democracy: Toward a revitalized cultural politics. (pp 175-194). Duke University Press.

Halberstam, J. (1997). Mackdaddy, superfly, rapper: Gender, race, and masculinity in the drag King scene. Social Text, 52(53), 105-131.doi: 10.2307/466736

(2013). Everything else is drag: Linguistic drag and gender parody on rupaul's drag race. Journal of Research in Gender Studies, 3(2), 15-26.

(2012). Reclaiming femininity. In (Ed.), Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond transgender and gender studies, pp. 170-183. Temple University Press.

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Normative drag culture and the making of precarity

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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).

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Drag 101: Canada's newest drag performers get schooled | CBC Radio

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Want to become a drag queen or king but don't know where to start? There's a class for that.

For the past two months, five aspiring performers have gathered in an empty room at Winnipeg's Prairie Theatre Exchange. Under the watchful eye of their drag fairy godmothers, they've practiced their walk, perfected their makeup and sharpened their attitudes - all with the goal of becoming the country's newest gender-bending entertainers.

And now, they're ready for their drag debut.

"I feel really humbled and so excited for them and their energy," said co-instructor Bobbi Hudon, also known as Pharaoh Moans.

"I've been doing drag for 18 years," agreed Vida lamour DeCosmo. "This is part of what I want to do: mentor and teach the new generation."

With help from Pharaoh and Vida, the five students - who go by the names Shanita Dee, Lex Contralata, Skirt Browning, Ruby Chopstixxx and Peppermint Phattie - have been honing their drag personas. Although drag is often associated with gay men, four out of the five new performers identify as women.

As the queens and king prepare, the mood in the dressing room is equal parts excitement and anxiety. This performance marks the first time that their family and friends will meet their drag alter-egos.

Their looks range from Lex Contralata's "pink military realness" to Peppermint Phattie's "clown mom gets off her day job at the painting company".

But the transformation is more than a cosmetic one. Skirt Browning says that embracing her drag persona has also made her more comfortable taking up space that women are sometimes denied.

"It's really about the spaces that women are allowed to occupy - and how much space they're able to take up. So Skirt has the entire stage."

Watching the "drag babies" attach their wigs and put the final touches on their contouring, Pharaoh Moans gets a little emotional about the drag community she's helped birth.

"I'm a very proud mother," said Moans. "And there's no labour pains! I'm loving it!"

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Drag 101: Canada's newest drag performers get schooled | CBC Radio

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Want to become a drag queen or king but don't know where to start? There's a class for that. For the past two months, five aspiring performers have gathered in an empty room at Winnipeg's Prairie Theatre Exchange.

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An (incomplete) queer history: Winnipeg drag

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An (incomplete) queer history: Winnipeg drag

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While RuPaul’s Drag Race sits at the forefront of drag representation in popular culture, there’s much more to the art form than simply female impersonation. Behind every drag performer, there are local histories spanning many decades.

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King Me! Alberta Drag King Performance,... | ERA

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King Me! Alberta Drag King Performance,... | ERA

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When it comes to issues of sexual diversity specifically within Canada, Alberta's history demonstrates a track record of extreme social...

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MSVU first Canadian university to offer online queer studies course

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This fall, MSVU will launch what is believed to be the first online intro to queer or LGBTQIA++ studies course in Canada. While most Canadian universities offer a gender studies program, or courses in gender studies, those focused specifically on queer studies are not common. Dr. Brenda Hattie-Longmire (pictured above), faculty member in Women's Studies at MSVU and the person who led the development of the course, believes that offering such a course is vital, particularly at a university that is committed to social responsibility.

"Around the world, including here in Canada, sexual and gender minorities are oppressed, attacked, violated and even murdered for being who we are. This is a human rights issue, and it's important to analyze and understand the ways in which sexuality and gender are socially constructed, and the way they function in relation to human history and cross-culturally. It's also important to explore the work of those who have resisted, rejected, and worked to reform institutionalized heterosexuality."

This course is just the beginning for Brenda, who hopes to work with the Women's Studies Department and a small committee of Mount faculty and staff to eventually develop a minor in queer studies, with several of the courses developed for online delivery.

"I'm always conscious that there are those who cannot study on campus for a variety of reasons, including the demands of a job and/or family, or perhaps they live and work in a rural community. Whatever the reason, we need to meet people where they are."

Brenda is a strong supporter of online learning due largely to her own personal experience with learning at a distance, and her desire to make education more accessible to a wider audience, especially women.

"I took my first Women's Studies course 21 years ago through MSVU's Distance Learning and Continuing Education Department (its title at the time) while living in a rural village. It was a transformative experience, so I know the value of distance and online delivery."

Brenda is looking forward to teaching the course in its entirety, but is especially excited about one topic. "I'm stoked about the whole course, but the connections between spirituality and drag have been very intriguing to dig into. Queer spirituality has been an interest of mine for quite some time, a topic I have explored through various research projects, including my doctoral research."

To view the course description for WOMS-1114 Introduction to Queer Studies, and to check out other online course options at MSVU, visit the MSVU website.

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MSVU first Canadian university to offer online queer studies course

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This fall, MSVU will launch what is believed to be the first online intro to queer or LGBTQIA++ studies course in Canada. While most Canadian universities offer a gender studies program, or courses in gender studies, those focused specifically on queer studies are not common.

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Once Upon A Time not too long ago and not too far away, yet high above in the sky, lived a people inside a rainbow. Often times, these rainbow dwellers would slide down and live alongside the people on the ground. Now, most of the rainbow people choose to live in great big cities with buildings that almost reach right back up to the sky so they can still feel close to home. Others prefer villages and smaller cities like Kingston, ON Canada. Kingston is very old, and is very grey and is made up entirely of limestone. The houses are limestone, the streets are limestone, even some of the people act like they're MADE of limestone! Some Kingstonians are very proud of their history and still treat many of the old, dead, white men that colonized their area as if they were still alive and that they should be adored and idolized like gods or super heroes or chocolate chip ice cream! However, there is also much beauty in the city and there are those in Kingston that, like the rainbow people, can see the vibrant colours that hum and thrum from its sidewalks to the tops of the tallest trees. These colourful citizens embrace music, art, laughter, love and people who are different unlike the limestone people who like things the same, grey, and rocky. So of course the people of the rainbow are made to feel welcome at one of the largest celebrations of art and love in the city ironically on the site of a historical burial ground- called Skeleton Park.

One year, two of the rainbow people's queens came to the Skeleton Park Arts Festival dressed in fabulous gowns and crowns and read for all the little children of the land. Normally they dressed like most boys do but on special days like that day, they wore their royal fineness to look pretty for the people. The children cheered and the grownups clapped with joyful approval and from that day on, this very special Drag Queen StoryTime occurred every year. Little did the rainbow people know, but word of their little tradition had gotten out thanks to the Facebook Fairies and cities all over the land, big and small were doing Drag Queen StoryTime. And although some of the rainbow people in bigger cities are claiming to have created this special event- we here in the land of limestone know the truth. The truth that sometimes the most magical, colourful moments to connect with each other can often originate from the smallest and greyest of places.

The End.

The T

Drag Queen StoryTime is now a world-wide phenomenon and has even been written about in the NY Times. The Times article however, erroneously credits a group out of San Francisco as starting the trend in December in 2015 and they seem to be taking the credit. So in this age of alternate facts, here's the T. Drag Queen StoryTime originated in Kingston, Ontario Canada in June of 2015 at the Skeleton Park Arts Festival. Executive Director of Reelout, Matt Salton had just returned from a trip in Toronto where he picked up a new book for the Reelout Lending Library from our friends at the Glad Day Bookshop called 10,000 Dresses (by Marcus Ewert, illustrated by Rex Ray published by Seven Stories Press). This beautiful story follows a young transgender girl named Bailey and her love for dresses. A couple of days later called Matt received an email from Mariah Horner, one of the festival's coordinators, asking community-serving agencies who had booths in the park to find unique and family-family ways to engage with attendees at the festival.

As Reelout is primarily an LGBTQ+ festival for adults, Matt pondered how the organization could thematically engage with families as he walked home and as he had many friends in the community who were drag queens and with the new book still fresh in his mind, Matt quickly reached out to his drag queen friends and asked if they would like to read the book to children on the day of the festival and it would be called Drag Queen StoryTime.

And so, on a sunny afternoon in McBurney (Skeleton Park) on June 20, 2015, the world's very first Drag Queen StoryTime/Hour was borne with Fabula Queen of the North and Lily Landers (Devine) reading 10,000 Dresses and And Tango Makes Three (Simon and Schuster) by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, illustrated by Henry Cole. Drag Queen StoryTime is now a staple of the programming at the Skeleton Park Arts Festival every year. And we are in talks with the Kingston Frontenac Public Library to offer more exciting programming this year!

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Once Upon A Time not too long ago and not too far away, yet high above in the sky, lived a people inside a rainbow. Often times, these rainbow dwellers would slide down and live alongside the people on the ground.

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Madelyne Beckles

Toronto artist Madelyne Beckles works across media to consider femininity, blackness and conceptions of womanhood as they are transmuted through popular culture, art history and contemporary theory. In Womanism is a Form of Feminism Focused Especially on the Conditions and Concerns of Black Women (2016), for example, Beckles uses the conceit of an infomercial to sell feminist and critical race theory. Her persona as a seemingly oxymoronic flirty feminist killjoy critiques academia and the forms of cultural capital that circulate through its systems of valuation. Beckles is cognizant of the ongoing need for intersectional practices in feminist spaces: "People talk about intersectionality in theory but are often unaccountable in living an intersectional life, and this is mostly due to self-segregation by class, race, queerness, ability, etc. It requires that one be deeply self-reflective, and then do a lot of work...which is not the most sexy." Beckles's forthcoming collaboration with Delilah Rosier restages the story of a 1968 pulp-erotica novella that recounts the life of a poor, so-described sexually liberated Black teenager. The book is by a man Beckles describes as "a very famous and well-respected white, male Canadian artist" who writes in a way that is far from nuanced. Works like this continue Beckles's rigorous and cheeky engagement with the politics and aesthetics of the canon, allyship, agency and Black femme sexuality.

Calla Durose-Moya

Video artist and filmmaker Calla Durose-Moya has an increasing interest in making hybrid moving-image work. Her analog videos are influenced by the work of prominent Canadian video artists (such as Lisa Steele, and Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby) who activate the feminist idea that "the personal is political" through a medium conducive to both literal and metaphorical self-reflection. Durose-Moya's approach to making contemporary art is shaped by the DIY ethos of both early video art and punk subcultures. When she performs for the camera, she is bringing a queer, racialized and disabled woman into view and working to embody and subvert different personas (some fictional, some historical). In séance (2017), she switches between playing herself and the persona of a white settler-colonial woman, a so-called pioneer of Peterborough. Over the course of the video, Durose-Moya takes a colonial-style wig on and off while reading from a script composed of different non-fiction sources, including Canadian colonial women speaking violently about local Indigenous people, and postcolonial theory by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon. Her queer, feminist polemic on the ongoing issue of settler colonialisms in Canada is highly citational yet startlingly accessible. In other videos, she takes a similarly DIY approach, like in adverse effects (2018), where she addresses her experience of mental health issues by describing the "shitty" side effects of her medications.

jaye simpson

jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Anishinaabe Two-Spirit writer, artist and poet from Skownan Nation and Sapotaweyak Cree Nation, in Treaty 2 and Treaty 4 Territories in Manitoba. There is often an explicitly activist dimension to their writing, which they read or perform live with a charged vulnerability and a fierce, loving dynamism. They write from their lived perspective as a survivor to address structural racism and the multifaceted experiences of Indigenous youth navigating foster care and family services in relation to colonial traumas of the Sixties Scoop, the residential school system and the Millennium Scoop. In their spoken-word reading "Let's Talk About White Vegan Witches," performed at the 2018 Vancouver Poetry Slam, they addressed the stark colonialism, classism and inaccessibility within present-day West Coast food movements: "Let's talk about all of the white vegan witches who are against the seal hunt, who are against Indigeneity, who are against food sovereignty. Let's talk about that for one fucking minute," simpson pronounces, to the sound of the audience snapping their fingers in applause. "Let's talk about how you call my Indigeneity and spirituality 'magic,' because that's how you understand it-it's not fucking magic!...Call them Elders. Call them medicine men and medicine women. Call them sacred. Keep them alive." This year, simpson was a co-organizer for Growing Room's Indigenous Brilliance, a reading series in Vancouver, where they performed alongside Indigenous women and 2SQ artists and writers, including Molly Cross-Blanchard and Arielle Twist.

Kim Kielhofner

Interdisciplinary artist Kim Kielhofner creates parafictional narratives and "autoportraits" by interweaving collage, sculpture, drawing, photography, performance and text into her video art. Her Reading Patterns Together (2016) is part of a series of iterative video work that engages practices of reading and incorporates visual metaphors alongside an almost paranoiac pattern-recognition in the world around her. In her studio in Montreal, Kielhofner assembles material objects by drawing associations between colour and shape, and layering them through philosophical storytelling. References accumulate in the videos-from appropriated clips of women in the history of cinema to the artist's reading of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star. Disassembling archetypes and rules, her videos invite us into another kind of space, an incantatory world with its own uncanny logic: "I'm trying to open a space where these objects-as subjects-can exist beyond their intended trajectory, where objects are used beyond their imagined life. There is an embrace of hesitation, doubt. My voice is not to be taken as authority, but it is your guide." Currently, Kielhofner is working with actor Barbara Ulrich on an intergenerational collaboration that extends her practice of reimagining cinematic histories and ideas of synchronicity, speculation and time through performances for the camera.

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Toronto artist Madelyne Beckles works across media to consider femininity, blackness and conceptions of womanhood as they are transmuted through popular culture, art history and contemporary theory. In Womanism is a Form of Feminism Focused Especially on the Conditions and Concerns of Black Women (2016), for example, Beckles uses the conceit of an infomercial to sell feminist and critical race theory.

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Opinion | What I Saw at Drag Queen Story Hour

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Washington
You can be forgiven if you haven't heard of "Drag Queen Story Hour," in which men dressed as women read to children at public libraries and lead them in song. Yet this strange phenomenon isn't limited to places like Manhattan and San Francisco. Story hours have been held, often to public consternation, in New Port Richey, Fla., Battle Ground, Wash., and Simpsonville, S.C.

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Opinion | What I Saw at Drag Queen Story Hour

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Washington You can be forgiven if you haven't heard of "Drag Queen Story Hour," in which men dressed as women read to children at public libraries and lead them in song. Yet this strange phenomenon isn't limited to places like Manhattan and San Francisco.

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What’s your name? What’s your look? What’s your message?

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Alaska and Other Queens Explain How to Do Drag For the First Time

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"It's hard to carve out time to practice," says KaiKai, "but it goes a long way."
How do I find a drag venue and get booked?
As in a lot of industries, it's all about who you know, which means you should get to know plenty of people, and let them know you.

"Find any gay or queer friendly bar," says Jelly. "Meet other queens, and most importantly of all be kind, courteous and helpful. Cheer other queens on, take photos or videos of the numbers, help pick up tips for the performers. Save the diva attitude for the stage."

Alaska agrees that a positive attitude is key. "You may have to be willing to work for free (or for tips) when you're first starting out. But making yourself available shows people you're a professional who wants to work, which leads to opportunities and it's a great way to meet people and make friends."

But even if you decide that it's worth it to perform for just tips, don't let "free" become your standard rate. When doing an unpaid gig, Kitty says, "make sure [the producers] know you're doing them a favor to set expectations."

And make the most of your time in the audience, KaiKai says. "It's important to learn from folks who have been doing this for a while, so watch the show with a critical eye and dissect what is working/what isn't working in a compassionate way."

"This is the hard truth - drag will take all your money," says Alaska. "It's very hard for it to be profitable when you are first starting out."
How do I do drag on a budget?
"Give up drag, LOL," jokes Kitty.

Being thrifty is key, says Jelly. "Cardboard, zip ties, and dollar stores will be your friend." And don't be afraid of repeating outfits! "When I started drag I had two dresses and one wig," says Jelly. "I rotated them and made a quick costume out of a bed sheet for another number during my first 6 months. An amazing queen once told me: If they are thinking you wore the same dress last week, your performance isn't good. If you go out and perform with confidence, all fashion sins will be forgiven."

"This is the hard truth - drag will take all your money," says Alaska. "It's very hard for it to be profitable when you are first starting out."

But, she adds, there's a magical moment that happens onstage when the audience falls in love with what you're serving. There's no way to put a price on that feeling.

"When you work really hard, and give the world something only you can give them," she says, "you can make it happen."

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Alaska and Other Queens Explain How to Do Drag For the First Time

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"It's hard to carve out time to practice," says KaiKai, "but it goes a long way." How do I find a drag venue and get booked? As in a lot of industries, it's all about who you know, which means you should get to know plenty of people, and let them know you.

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Have experience doing drag, publicly & non-publicly.

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Canadian Theater Review

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DAVE DEVEAU - VANCOUVER CHILDREN'S THEATRE

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DAVE DEVEAU - VANCOUVER CHILDREN'S THEATRE

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5 is manageable

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Smashing binaries

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Black, queer history
Giving credit where credit is due
Paris is Burning, 1990

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Performance

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ISSUE: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE & SOCIAL CHANGE

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ISSUE: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE & SOCIAL CHANGE

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Representation
Affirming practice

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QUEER-AFFIRMING EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN GUELPH

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QUEER-AFFIRMING EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IN GUELPH

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Like an audition reel

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Drag pedagogy The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood

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Cruising Utopia_ The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Sexual Cultures)

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Offering/lead pre-program & program tutorials

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Feedback from previous programs

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As an art form, drag has always been about breaking down barriers, exploring new territory and daring to do the unexpected. And now, a new type of queen is emerging on the scene: she's fierce, she's living in a time of unprecedented access to queer culture and she's younger than ever before. She's a drag kid, and she's a long way from the era of the queens who took part in the Stonewall riots nearly 50 years ago.

Stephan, Nemis, Bracken and Jason are very different kids living in very different parts of the world, but they're united by a deep love of drag.

Fiery Stephan (a.k.a. Laddy Gaga), 9, lives with his British expat family in the south of Spain, where his explosive performances can't be contained by their villa, so he has started performing at tourist restaurants.

Shy Jason (a.k.a. Suzan Bee Anthony), 11, lives in the U.S. Bible Belt where his chosen family have formed a protective circle around him that has allowed his sassy alter ego to blossom.

Precocious Bracken, 11, lives in Vancouver, where she struggles for acceptance as a "hyper queen" (a female drag performer) and for opportunities to connect in the 19-plus world of drag shows.

Child star Nemis (a.k.a. Queen Lactatia), 9, lives in Montreal, and with the help of his "momager," he loves pushing boundaries, from selling his merch at a local fetish store to judging a vogue ball in a downtown bar.

The four children in Drag Kids have never met, but they're coming together for the first time at Montreal Pride to perform a group number to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" and to compete in an all-ages vogue ball.

As they prepare for the big show, each child faces his or her own unique challenges, as well as challenges he or she has in common with the other performers: deep feelings of isolation (most have never met another "drag kid" before) and the struggle of trying to claim a place of one's own on the fringes of a fringe culture.

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Drag Kids: A new type of queen is invading a fringe queer culture

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As an art form, drag has always been about breaking down barriers, exploring new territory and daring to do the unexpected. And now, a new type of queen is emerging on the scene: she's fierce, she's living in a time of unprecedented access to queer culture and she's younger than ever before.

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Paris Is Burning (1990) - legendado (pt/BR)