Dirty Dragging. Performative Transpositions
Evelyn Annuß
Dirty Dragging contributes to queer retheorizations and explores the ambivalence of transgressive performances under apartheid, Nazism, and Jim Crow through a transoceanic lens. The book takes up the ambivalence of “dirty” performance modes—spanning drag and carnival to propaganda—and extends readings of gender bending by incorporating perspectives on blackface and “racialized drag”. It explores violent, locally specific mobilizations of the transgressive along with the ways in which queer and creolized forms of performance intertwine to oppose identitarian boundaries. Given the current slide into right-wing authoritarianism, the book thereby gestures toward the potential joy of collectively making societal conditions dance.
About the Author
Evelyn Annuß
is professor for gender studies and chair of the ICGP at mdw – University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna. One of her main areas of research is the relation of aesthetics and governmentality with a focus on theater and the performing arts. As a researcher in cultural, theatre, and literary fields, she deals with political spectacles, their historicity and mediality in the context of National Socialism, colonial racism, and (re-)fascism. Her book Dirty Dragging: Performative Transpositions has just been published in German together with a volume on Facing Drag. Gender Bending and Racialized Masking in Performing Arts and Popular Culture (co-edited with Raz Weiner, mdwPress 2025).
Dirty Dragging is based on research conducted in southern Africa, the USA, and the Alps, and was developed as part of the DFG Heisenberg Project Border Drawings and Performative Transpositions (FU Berlin).
“Evelyn Annuß has written a definitive, detailed, multi-sited, transnational his- tory of drag. This book offers a sinuous history of performance, race, collective- world-making and unmaking and it uses various national archives to resist any simple equation between drag and subversion. Spectacles of cross-dressing and black-face, she shows, intertwine across several racial regimes confounding the usual separation of these practices and demanding a careful investigation into when and how racial and gender crossing and passing are deployed within toxic nationalism and when and how they become a repudiation of purity and a queer and radical embrace of the inauthentic, the barbaric and the other. Dirty Drag- ging offers startlingly new readings of drag performance and is an instant classic!” – Jack Halberstam, Columbia University New York City Wild Things (2020), Female Masculinity (2019), und The Drag King Book (1999)
“Dirty Dragging ist ein Must Read: eine sehr produktive und politisch wichtige Intervention in die Queer und Gender Studies, die Kultur- und Theaterwis- senschaften und vor allem auch in die Performance Studies. Dirty Dragging hat das Potenzial, diese Disziplinen exemplarisch zu prägen, weil es nicht nur binäre, dualistische Perspektiven aufbricht. Mit dem Blick auf Kreolisierungs- prozesse können Drag, Geschlecht, Rassifizierung und Klasse in neuer Weise zusammenhängend verstanden werden.” – Isabell Lorey, KHM Köln Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory (2022), Die Regierung des Prekären (2020) und Immer Ärger mit dem Subjekt (2017)
“Evelyn Annuß thinks across history, geography, and forms of political practice to offer a capacious conception of dragging. The non-linear weft of this work complicates notions of genealogy, origins, and indigeneity.” – Zimitri Erasmus, Wits University Johannesburg Race Otherwise (2017)