Drag: Performance and Politics in the Americas Today

Abstract

Drag: Performance and Politics in the Americas Today analyzes a select range of contemporary performance work in Latin America and the United States that mobilize unintelligibility to confront a range of sociopolitical issues. Foregrounding this analysis is a theoretical intervention that seeks to (re)frame understandings of drag. Namely, I propose an understanding of drag—typically understood as a “man” performing (as) a “woman,” or vice versa—not as the performance-as-such. Rather, I contend that dragging bodies enact a disoriented/disorienting performative gesture and political move(ment) that instantiates a moment of radical queer futurity by inhabiting a time/space prior to identification. To establish this ontological reversal, I draw on insights from across disciplines that foreground process over categorization and trouble conceptualizations limited by fixed ideas of identity. To ground these theoretical ideas, I look to a select range of performers that strategically disorient hegemonic identity narratives and/or the power structures that sustain them in order to work towards imagining alternative, equitable futures across the Americas: Giuseppe Campuzano, Xandra Ibarra, Desvio Coletivo, Víctor Hugo Robles, and Lukas Avendaño.