ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I relay the findings of my eighteen months of fieldwork with the drag kings and bio femmes of the Cleveland Kings and Girls. Based on these observations, I articulate four conventions that define drag king performance as a genre: (1) lack of continuity in performers’ stage personas; (2) experimentation with a breadth of masculinities, especially those that sociologist Raewyn Connell calls “marginalized” and “subordinated” masculinities; (3) breach of the performer/spectator divide; and (4) elevation of marginalized racial and class identities. I conclude that through performances that embrace illegibility and plurality, drag kings invent a gender order that does not recognize patriarchal ideals as the gold standard. Finally, I argue that doing drag fundamentally changes the performers’ senses of self, leading them to new gender and sexual identities, and that this transformation is a function of interperformance.
