“We were queer way before gay liberation was invented.” Mogamat Kafunta Benjamin said this on the occasion of a small exhibition in Cape Town in 2019, which has since been widely received. Like so many others involved in Dirty Dragging, Mogamat didn’t live to see this publication. Today, our encounter feels like from another world. We first met during his guided tour of the District Six Museum, when I was researching carnival and the global history of blackface. From there he “schlepped” me next door to Kewpie: Daughter of District Six and showed me the drag photos of his friend with which this book now begins, five years later, in a changed global political situation. Mogamat’s refusal to subscribe to queer narratives of progress from the Global North turned my work around. Thanks to him, it leapt in a different direction and perhaps drew closer to pressing questions of today.
Texts emerge via detours, take unpredictable turns—often through chance encounters that offer perspectives at odds to one’s own viewpoint, disrupt the design of one’s research, and make one’s work a collective undertaking. In this sense, many people from very different contexts and at various stages of research and writing contributed to Dirty Dragging: reading, discussing, providing infrastructure, making contacts, offering impulses, producing leaps of thought …
Thank you all for the luxury of reflecting across perspectives on this project with me: Chris Standfest, Kai van Eikels, Adam Czirak, Wolfgang Struck, Sebastian Kirsch, Bettine Menke, Ulrike Haß, Zimitri Erasmus, Stephan Geene, Bafta Sarbo, Nitzan Lebovic, Kathrin Peters, Susanne Lettow, Isabell Lorey, Gerhild Steinbuch, Isabel Kranz, Bernhard Jensen, and many others; likewise the participants of my mdw colloquium, which for me became one of the most beautiful university events of recent years: Isabel Frey, Caroline Heider, Kyra Krauss, Constantin Luger, Ginan Seidl, Clarissa Thieme, Arne Vogelgesang, Abby Wagner, Sophie Zehetmayer, and all the others who joined in from time to time; as well as the students from various seminars on the topic at my home base, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), and at the University of Cape Town, FU Berlin, LMU Munich, and Ruhr University Bochum. Thanks also to the team of the newly founded International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP) at mdw, to Philipp Hohmann, Thari Jungen, Marina Rauchenbacher, Kyra Schmied, and Raz Weiner, as well as to the former IKM-gender studies team Mariama Diagne, Susanna Hufsky, Silke Felber, and Julia Ostwald.
Aurélie Godet, Zimitri Erasmus, Kim Vaz-Deville, Nadia David, Mark Fleishman, Elaine Frantz, Susann Lewerenz, Qondiswa James, Jack Lewis, Heike Becker, and Denis-Constant Martin, and many others have shared their research and materials with me. Moreover, my perspective has been shaped by three very different university contexts—three academic “mothers,” so to speak, in alphabetical order: the research on the chorus in theatre studies with Ulrike Haß at Ruhr University Bochum; the historically oriented gender studies at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Research at TU Berlin with Karin Hausen; and the literary studies research colloquium at the University of Erfurt with Bettine Menke, now continued by Wolfgang Struck, Dietmar Schmidt, and many others.
The book’s horizon is shaped by all kinds of academic contexts: most recently, by exchanges at the Centre for Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town and at Magnet Theatre (e. g., with Mark Fleishman, Jacki Job, Mwenya Kabwe, Mbongeni Mtshali, and Gerard M. Samuel); by the Facing Drag series with nora chipaumire, Diedrich Diederichsen, Zimitri Erasmus, Elaine Frantz, Stephan Geene, Aurélie Godet, Karin Harrasser, Nanna Heidenreich, Katrin Köppert, Eric Lott, Fatima Naqvi, Mamela Nyamza, Jay Pather, meLê yamomo, and Raz Weiner, some of whose contributions are being published around the same time in our Facing Drag collection coedited with Raz Weiner; by our collaborative university lecture series Facing the Authoritarian Drift (organized jointly with Sofia Bempeza, Nanna Heidenreich, Isabel Frey, Katrin Köppert, Isabell Lorey, Kathrin Peters, Johanna Schaffer, and many others) and the mdw series Criticizing Populism (with Therese Kaufmann, Susanne Lettow, and many mdw-colleagues). Also important were discussions at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures at FU Berlin anchored by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Matthias Warstat, and Gabriele Brandstetter (special thanks to my office buddy James Harding), as well as at FU’s theatre studies (thanks to Doris Kolesch), LMU theatre studies, and Chris Balme’s Global Theatre Histories research network.
Thanks also to the research resources at Tulane University in New Orleans (Elio Brancaforte) and Rutgers University (Fatima Naqvi), to the Senses of the South conference by Alexandra Hui (Mississippi State University), the De L’esclavage aux Black Indians conference (Steve Bourget and team together with Kim Vaz-Deville, Musée du Quai Brainly), and the MUMOK conference mixed up with others before we even begin organized by Franz Thalmair and Karin Harrasser, the DFG network Versammeln initiated by Julia Prager, and other research contexts such as the AG Theater und Geschlecht organized by Jenny Schrödl and Rosemarie Brucher and our working group Interdependencies.
Dirty Dragging is not just an academic matter in a room of one’s own. The book also incorporates field research from Cape Town, New Orleans, Gastein, and other places: joined by Oshosheni Hiveluah and Adam Czirak in Cape Town, Malik Iasis in New Orleans, and Wolfgang Struck in Gastein; and also by other friends and family—such as my parents Hanne and Bert Annuß—via phone.
In Cape Town, it was especially Melvyn Matthews who made it possible for me to participate in the carnival at Athlone Stadium for months. Melvyn facilitated contact with colleagues such as Denis-Constant Martin, as well as with the carnival participants themselves—the Atjas, all kinds of Klopse (clubs), Nigel Scheepers, and many others. Kenny Misroll and Mustafa Angel McCooper shared their video and photo collections with me. Thanks also to Linda Chernis from the GALA Archive at University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, as well as to the archivists at District Six Museum (including Tina Smith and Chris Julie), the Iziko Social History Collection Archives (including Esther Esmyol, Fatima February, Shanaaz Galant, Baheya Hardy, and Lailah Hisham), the National Library of South Africa (including Melanie Geustyn, Najwa Hendrickse, and Clive Kirkwood), and the Western Cape Archives in Cape Town and Mossel Bay (including Erika LeRoux and Erna Marx).
Thanks also to the Mardi Gras people of New Orleans who welcomed me and took me along, among them L .J. Goldstein and Antonio Garza, the Baby Dolls—e. g., Cinnamon Brazil Black, also Big Queen of the Fi Yi Yi Black Indians); Sylvester Francis from the Backstreet Cultural Museum and Ronald Lewis from the House of Dance and Feathers; Luqman Kevin Bush and Kevin Goodman—Big Chiefs of the Flaming Arrows—who sent me to the practices of the Monogram Hunters with Big Chiefs Pie Tyrone and Jeremy and Big Queen Denise Stevenson; gracious Nicole from First and Last Stop and Darryl Montana—Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahantas—who showed me his beadwork on spectacular Indian suits and took me to Le Pavillon Hotel to see the plaster works by his father Tootie; Regine and Randy Richter-McClain for their inexhaustible local knowledge; and many colleagues like Rebecca Snedeker, Thomas Sakakeeny, and Jonathan Morton. Thanks also to the archivists of Tulane University—especially the Carnival Collection, Hogan Jazz Archive (Lynn Abbott) and Amistad Research Center—and to The Historical New Orleans Collection (Heather Green), the Presbytère (Wayne Phillips), the Louisiana State Museum, the New Orleans Public Library archives, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Archives in New York, and Errol Laborde.
Peter Bassetti of Bassetti Pass and Christel Sendlhofer enabled me to participate in alpine Perchten and Krampus runs as well as domestic visits in Pongau, Austria. Thanks to the Gastein Perchten for their hospitality, to the Perchten association and the local museum, and to Michael Greger of the Salzburger Landesinstitut für Volkskunde, as well as to Elisabeth Egger of the Volkskundemuseum Wien. I also want to thank Peter Jammerthal of the Theaterhistorische Sammlungen at the Institute of Theatre Studies at FU Berlin, without whom I would not have come across Traugott Müller’s material on Ki sua heli, as well as the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn (Cologne University)—Peter Marx, Hedwig Müller, and Nora Probst, for their support on my Thingspiel research.
My ardent thanks for research assistance and corrections especially to Kyra Schmied, and to Susanna Hufsky, Paula Alamillo, Matti Renner-Motz, Stephanie Amarell, Dagmar Troestler, Benedikt Arnold, Karo Spöring, and Simon Dornseifer. Dirty Dragging could only be published thanks to infrastructural support from many IKM colleagues at mdw. Thanks especially to Dagmar Abfalter, Anita Hirschmann-Götterer, Slavomira Martiskova and Sarah Lang. Likewise thanks to Max Bergmann in particular and to Kathrin Heinrich from the mdwPress team—moreover, to mdw research support—Therese Kaufmann and Vitali Bodnar. The careful editing was done by Franziska Weber (German edition) and Michael Thomas Taylor (English edition); Claudia von Funcke handled the crucial image editing, and also Thari Jungen, Oliver Brentzel designed the cover and then redesigned it, saving me from a bout of depression over institutional preemptive obedience (see postscript). Aurélie Godet, L. J. Goldstein, Ryan Hodgson Rigsbee, Melvyn Matthews, Kenny Misroll, and Elianira Riveros Piro also provided their photographs. I would like to thank all of them—as well as the many others who played key roles in bringing this book into being. Dirty Dragging was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as part of my Heisenberg project “Demarcations and Performative Transpositions” at FU Berlin (thanks also for infrastructural support to Dorith Budich and many others) and, finally, by mdw (thanks especially to Ulrike Sych and Gerda Müller for the backing of this project by the rectorate in the midst of the current political climate change).
