Reframing Drag: Beyond Subversion and the Status Quo (Routledge Research in Gender and Society)

__Reframing Drag__ provides a critical survey of French and Anglo-American queer and feminist theorizations of drag performance, placing these approaches in a dialogue with contemporary drag practice and the representation of drag in three literary texts. Challenging pervasive assumptions circulating in existing queer and feminist analyses of drag performance, the author identifi es and questions three recurring ideas which have shaped the landscape of drag research: the argument that drag performances either uphold or subvert oppressive gender norms, the assumption that drag involves performing as the ‘opposite sex’, and the belief that drag can shed light on gender performativity. Informed by a range of gender and queer theory, this work contends that an intersectional, transfeminist approach to drag performance can provide richer, more nuanced understandings of drag and, unlike the ‘opposite sex’ narrative, acknowledges the gender diversity at work in current drag scenes. "Reframing Drag provides a critical survey of French and Anglo-American, queer and feminist theorizations of drag performance, placing these approaches in a dialogue with contemporary drag practice and the representation of drag in three literary texts. Challenging pervasive assumptions circulating in existing queer and feminist analyses of drag performance, the author identifies and questions three recurring ideas, which have shaped the landscape of drag research: the argument that drag performances either uphold or subvert oppressive gender norms, the assumption that drag involves performing as the 'opposite sex', and the belief that drag can shed light on gender performativity. Informed by a range of gender and queer theory, this work contends that an intersectional, transfeminist approach to drag performance can provide richer, more nuanced, understandings of drag, and, unlike the 'opposite sex' narrative, acknowledges the gender diversity at work in current drag scenes"-- Provided by publisher Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Drag! How queer? 2 Performing femininity, performing feminism: Anglo-American feminist responses to drag performance 3 French feminism and the Beauvoirian concept of ‘masculine protest’ 4 Exploring gender non-conformity and proto-queer parodic strategies in the work of Rachilde, Virginia Woolf, and Monique Wittig Conclusion: reframing drag – beyond binaries Index