The Routledge Companion to Drag

Introduction

SECTION I: The state of drag: at your own peril

1 The politics of drag
Leila J. Rupp, Verta Taylor, and Shae Miller

2 Super drags: untucking the controversial cancellation of Brazil’s first drag animation
Lucas Bragança

3 Drag as protected expression in law
Florian Kim P. Dayag

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

5 Embodying the illusion: transcending and reconstituting the regulatory state through Singapore’s drag scene
Cheney Thomas Y. Yap and Orlando Woods

6 Perverting the nation: resisting drag phobia in Sweden in the 21st century
Louise Wallenberg

SECTION II: Drag activism: changing times, changing lives

7 Pave the streets in lavender and red: sharing the gossip – understanding activist drag actions
Narzissa Helfritzsch

8 Drag and authoritarianism: the rhetoric and aesthetics of Drag Den as response to authoritarian rule
John Paolo Sarce

9 “Nothing’s gonna stop us now”: drag activism in Austria
Yvonne Prinzellner

10 “I would not be here [without drag]”: Travis Alabanza’s tranifest, drag archives, and promiscuous care practices
Elisabeth Massana

11 Guimpe-ing it up for the archive: the vestiary politics of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in the United Kingdom
Nina Kane

SECTION IIIL Histories: of kings, queens, and in-betweens

12 Against assimilation: A brief, but complex introduction to drag in Cape Town
Lindy-Lee Prince

13 “Tassie Kings”: drag king culture in regional spaces
Phoebe Adams, Sophie Keegan, Shan Hooper, and Kerryn Drysdale

14 Queering Blackpool
Helen Eadon-Sinkinson

15 Watching and joining ex-servicemen’s drag revues in post-war Britain: examining drag’s status as a queer art form
Jacob Bloomfield

16 “Maintaining the Illusion to overcome adversity”: drag performance and resilience in WWI camps
Carina Ehrnsperger

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

18 Mollies and tommies: excavating the eighteenth-century history of drag
Nowell Marshall

19 “You would not have known her from a woman”: cross-dressing men in eighteenth-century public spaces
Julie Gammon

SECTION IV: 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
Tommy Mayberry

21 Drag organic intellectuals: notes towards an embodied trans* anarchism
Samu/elle Striewski

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

23 Who dealt these cards? Gamifying drag as historiography for Molly subcultures
McKenna James Boeckner

24 Drag in the Czech post-socialist context: between straight mainstream and gay cultural fringe
Zdeněk Sloboda

SECTION V: Bodies/post bodies: werking beyond the wig

25 Encountering the fish and the ogre: unveiling political ambivalence in alternative drag performances in the Philippines
Ian Rafael Ramirez

26 (Re)Inventing the self: drag, posthumanism, and the collapse of human boundaries
Nick Cherryman

27 Dragging-up disability: intersections of gender and disability in deaf drag performance
Looi van Kessel

28 Dragging Latinidad: drag nightlife as Latinx excess
David Tenorio

SECTION VI: Drag and postcolonialism: giving face

29 “Can you get more American than Native American?”: drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Nishant Upadhyay

30 Inevitable face: the elegant opacity in the fabulation of masculinity
Angélica Adverse

31 Russian drag as practices of self- colonisation and decolonisation
Olga Andreevskikh

SECTION VII: Drag and media: watching me, watching you

32 Among unicorns: drag, queer activism and artistic production in the Middle East
Charlotte Bank

33 Censoring Huysuz: drag on Turkish TV and infringement of cultural expression
Serkan Kasapoğlu

34 Out of the bars and onto the screen: drag in independent North American film of the 1970s
Cameron Crookston

35 Carry on drag: cross-dressing and the queer legacies of the Carry On franchise
Simon Dodi

36 Drag and the Eurovision Song Contest in Central and Eastern Europe
Catherine Baker

SECTION VIII: Drag as/and form: it’s giving

37 Drag lyric/lyric drag
Zosia Kuczyńska

38 The dramaturgy of drag/ drag as dramaturgy
Christian Lewis

39 Dragging the dishonourable gentleman: lip-synching England’s C/conservative villains
Em Welton

40 Dragging AI: technotemporalities towards queer futures
Joe Parslow

41 Becoming versus imitation: The Zizi Show – a deepfake drag cabaret
Tengjin Bian

Biography

Stephen Farrier is Professor of Theatre and Performance, and Deputy Principal at Rose Bruford College, UK.

Garjan Sterk is a PhD Candidate and Educational Coordinator of Radboud Gender & Diversity Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Mark Edward is an interdisciplinary arts practitioner, a recovering academic, and author of key works on drag culture and bringing practical drag studies into higher education.