Facing Drag. Gender Bending and Racialized Masking in Performing Arts and Popular Culture
Evelyn Annuß & Raz Weiner (eds.)
Facing Drag brings together international experts from fields like history, media, theatre, and performance studies to explore how gender, race, and ethnicity are impersonated across time and cultures. Using diverse case studies, the volume examines acts of crossing, appropriation, and re-signification in performance, highlighting their political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. It expands the concept of drag beyond gender bending, investigating its intersections with racialization and colonial histories. The essays offer critical insights into both the subversive potential of drag and its entanglement with violent forms of othering and exclusion.
With contributions from Evelyn Annuß, nora chipaumire, Sam Ehrentraut, Zimitri Erasmus, Elaine S. Frantz, Aurélie Godet, Karin Harrasser, Nanna Heidenreich, Katrin Köppert, Eric Lott, Julia Ostwald, Jay Pather, and Raz Weiner.
The book is published in English.
About the editors
Evelyn Annuß, Professor of Gender Studies, heads the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (IGCP) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Her work is dedicated to the flight lines of aesthetics, theories of performativity, and the critique of politics. As a cultural studies scholar of theatre and literature, she focuses, among other things, on political spectacles—their historicity and mediality—in the context of National Socialism, colonial racisms, and processes of (re-)fascization. Her new book Dirty Dragging. Performative Transpositions is being published simultaneously in German and in English by mdwPress.
Raz Weiner (Dr.) is a scholar of performance studies, politics, and embodiment. His work focuses on traditions, archives and contemporary forms of colonialism, racialization and queerness, the production of bodies and knowledge, and the co-constitution of human societies and digital worlds. Before becoming a guest lecturer (2024) and research fellow (2023) at mdw, he was based in the School of Politics and IR at Queen Mary University in London (2020—2022) and the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at The Technion in Haifa (2021—2023).