Evelyn Annuß   How do we connect the manifold carnivalesque articulations of colonialism and racism to a queer understanding of drag in the sense of exaggerated display (Lorber 2004)? In what ways are these articulations reinvoked and commodified within new media assemblages and differentiated within diverse geographical contexts and varied trajectories of racialization and Othering? How might they be conceived …

Zimitri Erasmus   The rigid nature of the plantation encouraged forms of resistance, two of which have a shaping force on our cultures: the camouflaged escape of the carnival, which I feel constitutes a desperate way out of the confining world of the plantation, and the armed flight of marronage, which is the most widespread act of defiance in that …

Sam Ehrentraut   “im anfang, wenn wir uns in der küche trafen nicht zu zweit, guckten wir uns geheimnisvoll an. dann brauchten wir auch das nicht mehr. wenn einer nicht ausgelastet ist, belästigt er den andern. wenn wir zu zweit sind, sind wir zu mehreren. oder: wir sind immer auch zu zweit. es geht, weil es mit den andern geht.”1Ronald …

Nanna Heidenreich   Portrait of Jason, the fourth feature-length film by American filmmaker Shirley Clarke, was released in 1967. It is a white heterosexual female filmmaker’s film about and with a Black gay man, the self-professed “hustler” and performer Jason Holliday. After The Connection (1961) and A Cool World (1963), Portrait of Jason was Clarke’s third film about/with Black protagonists, …

Eric Lott   Trigger warning, anyone? Blackface performance has always been both offensive and indelible. Why does it endure if it is so objectionable? It still surrounds us in many different forms, types of entertainment, and horizons of expectation. Racial “drag” in the form of white performers in blackface seems to exist in some kind of eternal present. Instances of its …

Elaine S. Frantz   There is a reason why it surprises us to hear that blackened faces were probably as common as forms of Klan disguise as were elaborate robes and headgear. One of the greatest successes of Ku-Klux Klan apologists was convincing many of their contemporaries, and us, that Klan violence was unique, bizarre, and novel. This supposed otherness …

Black “Female Impersonators” in 1940s to 1960s New Orleans Aurélie Godet   While Judith Butler’s and Marjorie Garber’s works have been invaluable for challenging the supposedly natural relationships between the sex binary, gender, and sexuality, their theoretical insights have sometimes been criticized for their apparent disconnection from specific sociohistorical contexts in which “gender trouble” (Butler 1990) and “category crises” (Garber …

Katrin Köppert   Memes as Happy Objects of White Supremacy Some memes, “[b]y fate, or like magic” (Jackson 2019, 88), manage to extend their lifespan against the ephemerality of the internet, writes Lauren Michele Jackson in her 2019 book White Negroes, which followed her legendary article in Teen Vogue two years earlier. In this article, she had introduced the terminology …

Invisibilization and Hypervisibilization in Israeli Popular Culture Raz Weiner   Performance scholar Katrin Sieg coined the term ethnic drag in her book on racial, ethnic, and gender mimicry in Germany, where she extends the category of drag to include cross-ethnic performances. For Sieg, ethnic drag stands for a practice that excludes the material bodies of cultural Others and appropriates or …