Drag Kings: An Archeology of Spectacular Masculinities in Latino America

Session Submission Type: LASA Section Panel

Abstract

Recent critical inquiries into the notion of masculinity have had an enormous impact, weakening sexual hegemony and the consequent reproduction of the binary of gender. That is, the redefinition of the concept of masculinity—and its extension to masculinities—has dismantled the illusion of male anatomy as the sine qua non of the body in order to destabilize the violence that it exerts on the lives and habitability of other bodies. To activate a critical archeology of masculinity is to have an effect on the politics of visibility of gender and sex, as well as the material processes that solidify those sensibilities, affects, and practices that exceed the essentialism of masculinity. This panel will debate the future of gender in the unequal, plural, and contradictory space that we call Latino America. Taking the Drag King show and what we call spectacular masculinity as our starting point, we systematically revise the staging of masculinities and the possibility of generating a crisis in heterosexism. For one thing, we highlight notable antecedents of the contemporary Drag King show, early interventions in which women or transsexual, transvestite, or intersexual bodies use the dynamic capacity of the certainties of gender to produce the effect of masculinity. For another, we emphasize our work in reading both hegemonic masculinity and its exceptional models through a critical technology that turns up the volume on the dramatization of masculinity and its prosthetic and cosmetic bodies, a spectacular masculinity that is disconnected from control or exclusive administration by men.

Sub Track

• Section Sessions

Session Organizers

• Javier Guerrero, Princeton University

• Nathalie Bouzaglo, Northwestern University

Chair

• Margarita Sayak Valencia Triana, Colegio de la Frontera Norte

Discussant

• Viviane A Mahieux, University of California/Irvine

Individual Presentations

• Voice Makes the Man - Licia Fiol-Matta, New York University

• Al principio era el "butchness": Drag Kings en Latinoamérica - Margarita Sayak Valencia Triana, Colegio de la Frontera Norte

• Post-Drag - Daniel A Link, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero

• Incógnita genital - Javier Guerrero, Princeton University

• Doña Bárbara Drag King. Marimachas, hombrunas y devoradoras de hombres - Nathalie Bouzaglo, Northwestern University