Dismantling Bastions of Masculinity: Rebellious Acts in Leigh Crow’s Archival Practice

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

Abstract

Leigh Crow occupies a seminal position in drag king performance, emerging as a pioneering figure best known for portraying Elvis Herselvis, the first widely recognized female-to-male Elvis impersonator. Crow has been instrumental in expanding the visibility and cultural significance of drag kings, a performance tradition historically overshadowed by the prominence of drag queens. This presentation examines Crow’s extensive career, with particular attention to her reimaginings of Elvis Presley and Captain Kirk, arguing that her performances function as acts of embodied historiography that destabilize hegemonic masculinity, interrogate racialized celebrity, and reconfigure cultural memory through a queer and feminist lens.

Building on David Román's concept of archival drag as historiographic intervention, Diana Taylor's theory of cultural transmission through embodied memory, and Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's queer world-making, I position Crow within a lineage of gender-subversive performers, connecting her work to 19th-century male impersonators and the late 20th-century rise of drag king culture. Crow’s impersonation of Presley queers the King of Rock and Roll, exposing the racial and gendered constructs underlying his superstardom while reframing him as a lesbian icon. Her satirical approach foregrounds the performativity of white male dominance in popular culture while complicating the cultural nostalgia surrounding Presley’s legacy. Similarly, Crow’s performances in Star Trek Live employ gender reversals and hyperbolic masculinity to critique the ideological structures embedded in Cold War-era science fiction, revealing how representations of leadership, authority, and sexuality in 1960s media remain sites of contestation in contemporary queer discourse. Crow’s career underscores the broader marginalization of drag kings within mainstream LGBTQ performance culture, where drag queen visibility has been amplified by platforms such as RuPaul’s Drag Race while drag kings remain underrepresented. Her exclusion from the 1996 International Elvis Presley Conference, following backlash from religious and corporate stakeholders, exemplifies the mechanisms through which heteropatriarchal institutions regulate cultural memory and reinforce the boundaries of acceptable gender expression. By performing the archive in drag, Crow challenges these exclusions, asserting the legitimacy of queer historical reinterpretation as a mode of cultural production.

I argue that Crow’s archival drag serves as a critical intervention in dominant historiographies, activating the past through performative estrangement and subverting fixed notions of authenticity and authority. Her work not only expands the lexicon of drag performance but also reclaims historical figures through a queer perspective, demonstrating the capacity of drag to function as a historiographic tool. In this way, Crow’s legacy extends beyond performance, offering a model for how archival engagement can operate as a site of resistance, reclamation, and queer futurity.

Author

• Tinamarie Ivey, University of Texas Dallas