ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish the multilayered components of transformismo—or drag—as a queer intervention that disrupts hegemonic discourses in mainstream LGBTQ culture in Chicago, and challenges the city’s history of racial segregation. It explores how the reproduction of Latinx transformismo culture complicates understandings of queer experiences as they intersect with racial systems in the US, while acknowledging the multiplicity of identities in Chicago’s Latinx community.
The chapter’s discussion develops around Cabaret Parodia, a Latinx queer performance group based out of Chicago, whose parodies—performed in Spanish, and in drag—engage and disengage with LGBTQ and “straight” venues in Chicago. Cabaret Parodia’s geographical location informs both Latinx placemaking and Latinx queer identities in a city marked by stark racial segregation. This history of segregation has resulted in the establishment of a queer enclave—Boystown—that is rife with race- and class-based issues, which raises contradictions in terms of its attempt at queer liberation. The creation of safe spaces by white middle-class LGBTQ people in New York and San Francisco has engendered privatization and policing practices, and the LGBTQ Boystown neighborhood of Chicago has followed this trend. I argue that through transformismo, Cabaret Parodia highlights and subverts practices of discrimination both in Chicago’s Latinx enclaves and the LGBTQ Boystown neighborhood.
