Location: Room 406, Dalhousie Arts Centre
Moderator: Kelsey Jacobson
Sponsored by The Cole Foundation
King Me: Dragging the History of Male Impersonation in Drag King Decades
My paper examines the 2019 drag cabaret show Drag King Decades, produced by and starring Clare “Flare” Smyth. The show features seven drag kings (both queer cis women and trans men) who perform modernized historic enactments of famous (and some forgotten) male impersonators from the 19th and 20th centuries. Flare, who worked as a research assistant on Toni Latour’s Drag King History Project, works with the performers to select historical figures who resonate with the performers’ aesthetic and
artistic style, providing research notes and curating the show’s historical scope. In addition, flare performs a number himself. Also, it serves as the MC of the show, providing introductory history lessons between numbers to introduce and contextualize each performer and their respective historical figure.
Combining a mix of performance analysis and an interview with the show’s creator, my paper considers how Flare’s dramaturgy allows for staging a queer archive that challenges traditional ways of understanding queer histories and complicates the historicizing of transgender identity politics. I also consider Flare’s dramaturgy through the lens of queer temporal theory to examine how her production performs, something akin to Heather Love’s concept of “imagined ancestors.” Additionally, my work draws on studies of lesbian camp to examine the way drag kinging and masculine camp provide a variation on the more dominant aspects of camp that focus on femininity and the gay male/trans feminine experience in popular drag performance.
Cameron Crookston, The University of British Columbia Okanagan
Bio: Cameron Crookston is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at UBC Okanagan. His work appears in The Drama Review and GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, among others. He is also the editor of The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the CTR Winter 2021 issue on drag in Canada.
Kate Hamill’s 2019 Little Women
Minneapolis’s Jungle Theatre commissioned Kate Hamill to write a new interpretation of the postbellum American classic Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I served as dramaturg for this premiere production, the New York production at Primary Stages, Dallas Theatre Center, and the Old Globe in San Diego. This coming-of-age novel influenced generations of young women, who often imagined themselves as one of the March sisters. Similar to her fictional surrogate Jo, Alcott wanted to embrace activities traditionally affiliated with boys. Gender identity is central to Hamill’s interpretation, as Jo is nonbinary, as arguably Jo is in Alcott’s novel, and Alcott was throughout her lifetime (during the mid-to-late 1800s). In Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam surmises that “tomboy-ism tends to be associated with a natural desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys…Tomboy-ism is punished, however, when it appears to be a sign of extreme male identification and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence” (6). Much like in Alcott’s Little Women, Hamill’s characterization of Jo, a tomboy, is the family’s delight, but then Jo expresses themselves differently than their sisters. Considering Halberstam’s thesis, Jo’s tomboy-ism extends into young adulthood and threatens 19th-century decorum when they “refuse to become a lady.” For Hamill, aligning Jo’s growth as a writer with their discovering their gender identity was central. Additionally, set during the Civil War, casting these productions with a multiracial family was critical to tell this narrative in 2019. This paper will consider the historiographical and dramaturgical resonance of Hamill’s Little Women.
Kristin Leahey, Assistant Professor Boston University
Bio: Her publications include recent articles in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, New England Theatre Journal, as well as articles in the anthologies Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces, Routledge Companion to Latinx Theatre and Performance, and the Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy Anthology. She is a 2021 recipient of a Fulbright.
