Isn’t it Iconic?: Drag Celebrity and The Maintenance of Our Worlds

• In Event: Drag Infrastructures: Networks of Gender Expansive Resistance

Abstract

While criminalization and harassment of drag performers and audiences is not new, today, drag finds itself a cultural linchpin in the global “anti-gender movement,” whose fascist tactics, according to Judith Butler, seek “the restoration of a patriarchal dream order” (2024, 15). Around the world, but especially vitriolic in the United States, drag artists and venues have faced coordinated anti-drag legislation, harassment, and violence. Because the impacts of this global movement are felt most deeply by people on the local level, in this essay, we reflect on the ways that local drag celebrity can anchor queer histories, politics, and activism. When queens, kings, and things take on the voice of George Michael or Donna Summer or Dora the Explorer or (in one memorable performance in Fort Worth, Texas, by drag thing Brock Bottoms) the sinking Titanic and the glacier that destroyed it, they remind us all of the expansive access we have to these glamorous, erotic, silly, dangerous, and confusing embodiments.

Drag celebrity—being powerful, glamorous, and confident to a particular community, in a particular place, while living in a larger context that perceives you as pathetic, predatory, and disgusting—is at the heart of drag’s critical work. We offer “drag infrastructures” as a critical framework to understand drag celebrity at work. Drag infrastructures, as briefly defined in the overarching abstract for this panel, maintain the flow between local, national, and international levels of fame, and they also become a means of survival in critical times. Through reattuning us to the infrastructure of drag, and more specifically, the structures and community care work that make drag possible, we aim to better understand the radical potential of drag at a time when attempts to overdetermine drag’s meaning in the public square are affecting performers, audiences, and queer and trans populations. As we see it, to become an icon is to be implicated in drag infrastructure.

Authors

• Catherine A Evans, Carnegie Mellon University

• Nino X Testa