Drag is tied to gender impersonation and crossing, but it is also more than these things. It is also a form of social critique and a genre for aesthetic expression. In this way, it shares qualities with performance art, although drag emerges from specifically queer cultural histories. German scholar Renate Lorenz , p. Cities have their own unique drag ecologiesβlocal stars, traditions, chosen families, and tensions.
For the last several years, I have been engaged in a multi-sited ethnographic project about drag, one that looks to artists and activists who use it to communicate political and aesthetic ideas. One of the artists and activists I worked with in Berlin cuts across two of these sites.
She returned in at the onset of the Second Intifada and threw herself into the overlapping worlds of art-making, activism, and queer world-building. Berlin remains popular among the global, budget-conscious creative class, though this influx has also resulted in troubling gentrification. Meeting her for the first time at Edelweiss, a cafe housed in the blunt architecture of a former railway station, I was struck by how she was small, yet managed to take up space.
Framing a pale face and held up with a silk flower, her hair was a shocking red, a welcome source of color on a gloomy spring day and an echo of the graffiti on the north face of the building. She was femme, girly, but also extravagantly armored in layers of jewelryβbangles clanked whenever she moved her arms, glitter sparkled on her cheeks, her folded legs raised her up, making her queenly.
The same mixture of vulnerability and bravado infuses her work. After a presentation, a prominent drag-king performer, gender theorist, and scholar challenged me to explain why Kantorowicz should be included in this project. Drag, this scholar insisted, is about impersonation, about drawing on conventions of gender, imitating or exaggerating them. What gender does Kantorowicz imitate? I responded that drag is tied to gender and gender performativity, but it is also not limited to them.
