Drag Kinging

Body & Society, Vol. 13, No. 1, 61-106 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X07074779
© 2007 SAGE Publications

Drag Kinging: Embodied Acts and Acts of Embodiment

Julie Hanson

Adelaide University, Australia

This article offers speculative analyses on embodiment and corporeality, with particular reference made to drag kinging as an embodied performance of female masculinity to both initiate and highlight these. In particular I explore and employ Karen Barad's post-humanist elaboration of performativity, and Warwick and Cavallaro's provocative discussions on the dress/body relationship to do this. This lends itself to thinking and theorizing corporeality and the socially produced body in terms not reducible to easy dualisms; for example, material/immaterial, mind/body and nature/culture divides. By maintaining a ‘tension’ between such dualisms, I hope to highlight, through personal drag king narratives and my own speculative writing, that drag kinging is much more than just a ‘performance’, but is in fact a powerful corporeal experience that I have come to term ‘drag king embodiment’. 

Key Words: corporeality • drag • embodiment • female masculinity • performance