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This book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive.
It studies the complex relationship between drag performance, LGBTQ+ venues and queer communities. In exploring drag performance, the book develops a greater understanding of the connection between drag performance and queer communities, in particular exploring how drag might facilitate queer communities and offer queer modes of survival and resistance for queer people. Through this, the book describes a contemporary moment in which drag performance is increasingly popular and increasingly important at a time when homophobic and transphobic violence is prevalent, and LGBTQ+ venues are often under threat of closure. Understanding the increased/increasing mainstream popularity of drag, the book examines drag performance that is connected to and resists mainstream attention in order to account for its complexity in London (and beyond).
This book takes the author's engagement with and love for drag and exerts a critical, political and queer pull in order to develop new terrains of queer studies and queer performance studies.
List of contents
1. Present Drag: Hope in the Face of Drag 2. Classic Drag: Edginess, Visibility and Spiteful Drag 3. Killjoy Drag: Queer Side-Eyes and Dragging Backwards 4. Silly Drag: Failures, Failsafes and Plumbing the Depths of Stupidity in Drag 5. Besides Drag: On the Edge of the Scene 6. Future Drag: Drag Performers Show Up
About the author
Dr Joe Parslow is a Head of Research and Postgraduate Provison, Assosicate Professor, at Rose Bruford College, UK. They are queer researcher, writer, teacher and producer, as well as working in research ethics and integrity and practice research. They have worked extensively in queer nightlife as a producer of drag and cabaret events in LGBTQ+ spaces in London.
Summary
This book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive.
Report
'By inviting readers to view pub and club drag from a range of vantage points, Parslow draws us into a deeper appreciation of the form's unique techniques, peculiar pleasures and vital contributions to queer community-building. This is a thoughtful, heartfelt and generous book that finds hope in spite, depth in stupidity, and sustenance in the low-key chaos of drag performance.'
Fintan Walsh, Head of the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication and Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London
