Intimate Investments In Drag King Cultures

This book takes the globally recognised phenomenon of drag king performances as an opportunity for critical inquiry into the rise and fall of an urban scene for lesbian and queer women in Sydney, Australia (circa 1999-2012). Exploring how a series of weekly events provided the site for intimate encounters, Drysdale reveals the investments made by participants that worked to sustain the sense of a small world and anchor the expansive imaginary of lesbian cultural life. But what happens when scenes fade, as they invariably do? Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures is unique in capturing the perspective of a scene at the moment of its decline, revealing the process by which a contemporary movement becomes layered with historical significance. Bringing together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the everyday and the mobile urban spaces they inhabit, this book has appeal to scholars working across gender, sexuality and culture.

Dispelling the myth that drag kings are simply 'women doing drag', The Drag King Anthology presents enlightening essays that address gender, sexuality and feminism. Using prose, poetry and photographs, an eclectic mix of scholars, performers and fans offer cultural and political insights on the international growth and development of drag king troupes and communities.

While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who perform exaggerated masculine personas onstage under such names as Adonis Black, Papi Chulo, and Oliver Clothesoff. King of Hearts shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversity, it profiles not only white drag kings, but also those who are African American, multiracial, and Hispanic. Queer scholar Baker A. Rogers—who has also performed as drag king Macon Love—takes you on an insider’s tour of Southern drag king culture, exploring its history, the communal bonds that unite it, and the controversies that have divided it. King of Hearts offers a groundbreaking look at a subculture that presents a subversion of gender norms while also providing a vital lifeline for non-gender-conforming Southerners.

Thinking and writing about the past, challenging what 'history' might be and how it could appear is an ongoing interest of this journal and an ongoing (sometimes contentious) point of connection between cultural studies and history. The shifts in how we research and write the past is no simple story of accepted breakthroughs that have become the new norms, nor is it a story where it is easy to identify what the effects of cultural studies thinking on the discipline of history has been. History has provided its own challenges to its own practices in a very robust way, while the cultural studies has challenged what the past is and how it might be rendered from a wide ranging set of ideas and modes of representation that have less to do with specific disciplinary arguments than responses to particular modes (textual, filmic, sonic), particular sites (nations, Indigenous temporalities, sexuality, literature, gender) and perhaps a greater willingness to accentuate the political in the historical.

What is a drag king? Why have drag kings not been as numerous or as popular as their drag queen counterparts in popular culture? Are drag kings lesbians? The Drag King Book tells you everything you've wanted to know and more about the lives and performances of contemporary male impersonators. The book profiles many different performers, among them San Francisco's larger-than-life Elvis Herselvis and New York's mackdaddy Dred, and presents interviews with drag kings alongside descriptions and analyses of actual shows. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 pictures by transgender photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, The Drag King Book is a striking testament to the multiple forms of gender variance today.

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography reviews and expands the field and scope of sensory ethnography by fostering new links among sensory, affective, more-than-human, non-representational, and multimodal sensory research traditions and composition styles. From writing and film to performance and sonic documentation, the handbook reimagines the boundaries of sensory ethnography and posits new possibilities for scholarship conducted through the senses and for the senses. Sensory ethnography is a transdisciplinary research methodology focused on the significance of all the senses in perceiving, creating, and conveying meaning. Drawing from a wide variety of strategies that involve the senses as a means of inquiry, objects of study, and forms of expression, sensory ethnography has played a fundamental role in the contemporary evolution of ethnography writ large as a reflexive, embodied, situated, and multimodal form of scholarship. The handbook dwells on subjects like the genealogy of sensory ethnography, the implications of race in ethnographic inquiry, opening up ethnographic practice to simulate the future, using participatory sensory ethnography for disability studies, the untapped potential of digital touch, and much more. This is the most definitive reference text available on the market and is intended for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and the social sciences, and will serve as a state-of-the-art resource for sensory ethnographers worldwide.

Masculinity is no longer a monolithic category, if ever it was. Long Live the King is a solid piece of scholarship that explores in depth the drag king phenomenon as well as key theoretical texts by feminist, postcolonial and cultural thinkers. Maite Escudero-Alías delves into drag king culture and highlights its relevance for the study of the relationship between gender, sex, race and sexuality. Introduced by a well-informed theoretical chapter that traces the roots of queer theory, Long Live the King provides the reader with a rigorous textual and cultural examination of drag kings’ most innovative performances of masculinity in the USA and the UK. These chapters prove groundbreaking in their acute analyses of drag kings’ acts in different media, ranging from still images to live performances, documentaries, mainstream television series and literature. Theory and analysis blend perfectly and Escudero-Alías’s main contention in this research – the ambivalent nature of drag kings’ performances of masculinity – is conducted convincingly. This book constitutes an invaluable contribution to the field of gender studies and a fair assessment of the political impact of minority artistic practices in contemporary culture.

Flying Aeroplanes and Other Sociological Tales is an introductory textbook for students wishing to learn about sociology and social research methods. Each of the short tales, told by a sociologist, introduces topics and research methods using an engaging storyline. The opening story narrates how the sociologist uses participant observation to understand the work of a commercial pilot, and how he feels about autopilot systems replacing his job of flying aeroplanes. Other tales feature topics such as education, health, crime, and gender. There is also a chapter on ‘lockdown’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. One main feature of the book is the ‘back door’ approach to teaching research methods, with chapters dedicated to exploring statistics, sampling, visual methods, documents, embodied methods, autoethnographic research and ethics. Traditional textbooks in sociology focus on what novice sociologists should do, but few, if any, comprehensively deal with overcoming problems as they might emerge and explain what to do when things go wrong. The sociological tales written in this book provide examples of when field access is denied, research participants refuse to take part, and when recording equipment has broken down. Each tale raises issues and problems for the sociologist to overcome, such as research design flaws, sampling bias, lack of rapport with research participants, and the problems with breaking ethical codes of conduct. The book provides insight into the role of the sociologist, why sociology matters, and what happens when sociology fails us. Flying Aeroplanes and Other Sociological Tales introduces a unique approach to teaching sociology and social research methods.