Introduction

This introduction begins by familiarizing readers with conceptual trends traversing academic analyses of drag performance, including the perception of drag as necessarily either subversive or reactionary and the belief that drag can be defined by a binary opposition between performer identity and character gender. Deploying a transfeminist perspective, this chapter examines how these conceptual trends permeate French and Anglo-American queer and feminist analyses of drag, and questions how drag, as practiced in contemporary French, UK, and American subcultures, can be theorized without relying on reductive ‘opposite sex’ paradigms. The author concludes the chapter by outlining the nature of their particularizing, transfeminist approach to drag, and explains their reasoning for their choice of corpus.