Fake Moustache and Lip Sync : Activism As Embodied Experience in Drag King Performances

Recently, feminist theory and queer activism have re-operated a turn towards embodiment and intimacy and their role in collective action. Yet, theoretically, constructivist approaches of gender tend to steer sociological research on those topics towards a discursive abstraction, whereas methodologies based on embodied experience are scarce and often treated with embarrassed discretion. As an element of the queer and feminist repertoire of collective action, drag king workshops and performances are also confronted with these blind spots.

The art of drag is indeed usually studied as means of subversion, and studied as a discourse exposing the artificiality of gender as a performance (Butler 1990). Moreover, drag king practices’ close connection to lesbian, transgender and feminist activism (Halberstam 1998; Torr et Bottoms 2010) illustrate their role as a political tool. The embodied experience of the drag performance is, however, often put aside. This paper will thus study the role of the body as a political tool and its consequences with regard to emotion or sexuality - as components of the experience itself, and of the repertoire of collective action.

Fieldwork has been led in drag king workshops and shows in Brussels between 2018 and 2024 in the form of an autophenomenography (Allen-Collinson 2013). This autoethnographic method, relying on phenomenology and new materialist perspectives on embodiment (Frost 2011) to investigate the power of bodily transformation through drag as a political tool. The set of techniques acquired in the practice indeed seems to remap bodily sensations at the same time as the sense of a gendered self. The embodied transformation and knowledge resulting from it offer a resolution to the epistemological dilemma of analyzing the material body from a constructivist approach of gender, thus illustrating the necessity of experience both in terms of scientific research and activist objectives.