Reading & Composition
Drag: The Performance, Work, and Look of Identity
“In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.” - Judith Butler
“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” - RuPaul
Looks. Shade. Work. In addition to being an artform with a special place within queer communities, particularly queer communities of color, drag has served academics as a model for the ways we perform and subvert gender and other aspects of identity. What does it mean to perform an identity that “isn’t” yours? What does it mean to cross over gender/racial/temporal lines, or to ag or pass as a different identity? To what extent might all identities be understood along the lines of drag performance? And if identity is a matter of performance--if perhaps one that we cannot opt out of without dangerous consequences--what might it mean to perform or inhabit an identity “authentically”? How does the recent mainstream commercial success of drag as an artform open new avenues for exploration of identity — or risk reifying stereotypical, rigid notions of gender, and continue to exclude historically marginalized bodies? And what of the fun, the danger, and the drama of drag performance might we bring to these serious questions about identity? This class will explore drag in the broadest sense as the conscious and sometimes hyperbolic performance of identity. Together, we will ask these questions while reading and watching across a range of eras, genres, and geographies, including cross-dressing medieval knights, Shakespearean disguises, ball culture, the race-segregated US metropolis, kink fantasy, and critical theory.
This is a Reading & Composition course, and our main objective will be to develop critical reading and writing skills. To that end, substantial class time will be devoted to writing workshops and peer reviews. In addition to completing frequent essay assignments and revisions, students will be expected to read up to 100 pages of literary and scholarly texts each week, and to participate actively in class and virtual discussions.