Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Limp Wrists, Clenched Fists: An Analysis Of Queer Performance Art As A Tool For Political Resistance, Neha Verma

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper explores the use of queer performance art as a tool for community mobilization and resistance to socio-legal oppressions. This essay is grounded in movements for queer liberation in the Global South, racialized working-class queer communities, and queer disability justice. As queer culture and aesthetics are often misappropriated for wider cisheteronormative audiences, this work reminds the revolutionary nature of queer performance art.

Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …

Tale Of Two Judiths: Queering Judith With The Works Of Judith Butler, Kat S. Lewis

Religious Studies Honors Projects

Biblical texts play a significant role in shaping expectations for behavior based on gender in Western societies. In my queer reading of the Book of Judith, I argue that Judith’s performance of gender is fluid and gender expansive. I use reader-response criticism to interpret Judith in conversation with the works of Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood on gender performativity, drag, and agency. This queer reading of Judith provides representation of gender expansiveness in biblical texts and explores queer possibilities in Judith as a way to challenge and subvert a patriarchal, heterosexist gender binary.

Drag Artist Interviews, 2020, Destiny Baxter, Ezra Temko, Adam Loesch

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This public dataset contains transcripts of 8 in-depth semistructured interviews with drag artists. Destiny Baxter conducted these interviews during Spring 2020. This follows up on an available dataset of 22 interviews of drag artists conducted in Spring 2019 by SIUE students, available at https://spark.siue.edu/siue_fac/104/

All 2019 and 2020 interviews used the same instrument.

Drag Artist Interviews, 2019, Ezra Temko, Adam Loesch

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This public dataset contains transcripts of 22 in-depth semistructured interviews with drag artists. Students conducted these interviews during Spring 2019.

Performing Queerness, Jasmina Sinanovic

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a course Performing Queerness

The Gentrification Of Drag, Kyle Kucharski

Capstones

The world of drag has reached virtual mainstream visibility thanks to a combination of shifting social norms, social media and the success of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race (which just won its third Emmy). No longer relegated to the confines of queer subculture, drag queens are now exported worldwide on prime-time television. When a “man in a dress” is no longer subversive, how can drag as a subculture continue to push the boundaries?

This critical essay looks at the art of drag, its historical position in culture and how its currently blowing up mainstream entertainment. Increased success and visibility can …

Lg Ms 035 Ryan Conrad Collection Finding Aid, Katharine Renolds Thomas

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Ryan Conrad is a radical queer activist. He is co-founder of Naughty North, an inter-generational radical queer/trans direct action collective in Maine. He participates as a volunteer, board member, and/or advisor for a number of community organizing groups, including EquityFund (board member 2008-present), Outright Lewiston/Auburn (Special Projects Coordinator and volunteer advisor, 2006-present), Maine HIV Prevention Community Planning Group (2009-present), and Maine Video Activist Network (co-founder and volunteer, 2006-present), among others. Conrad curated the June 2009 exhibition "Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives" at Maine College of Art. The Collection contains materials related to radical queers in Maine …

A Performative Script: Play With(In) Me, Erik Patton

Theses and Dissertations

Patton continues his interest in the body, its relation to material, the notion of abstraction (specifically related to queerness), and the phenomenological with this performative script. Enter the bath first; you must wash your dirty asshole, as you shat only two hours ago. Collect your body in the Silver Pond.

Privilege And Marginalization In Drag Communities In The United States, Dustin Satterfield

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Within the gay and lesbian community, there is a smaller community of drag performers. These entertainers make a performance of gender stereotypes. Non-male performers have observed that male privilege is reproduced in this community despite a hyper awareness of oppressions and gender status. Using an online questionnaire I examined male privilege and non-male marginalization in United States drag communities. I asked drag performers about their perceptions of themselves and their perceptions of other performers within their local drag communities. I find that self-perceptions of privilege are highest for male performers and self-perceptions of marginalization are higher for non-male performers. I …

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple Of Dionysus And Queer Fear Of The Feminine, C. Heike Schotten

Political Science Faculty Publication Series

This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's …

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple Of Dionysus And Queer Fear Of The Feminine, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

No abstract provided.