The 2024 CASCA meetings will feature a drag performance and academic panel—both featuring Vancouver-based performer Shay Dior—to be held in Kelowna’s entertainment district. In preparation, CASCA’s Communications Officer Andrew Walsh spoke with Dr. John (Song Pae) Cho (Assistant Professor, UBC-Okanagan) about the event. In keeping with the theme of CASCA 2024—”Sedimented Histories, Vital Trajectories”—the conversation begins with a discussion of the history of drag in anthropology and ends with thoughts on what students in attendance might take away as they ponder the future of our discipline. Tickets to this performance and panel—“Drag as Decolonial and Anti-Racist Resistance”—are available through the 2024 CASCA Conference Registration page here: in English https://blogs.ubc.ca/casca2024/english-register/ and en français https://blogs.ubc.ca/casca2024/francais-inscription/

Q: Can you tell us a little about the drag show and panel planned for the opening of CASCA 2024? How did plans for this special event come about? What can those attending expect?

Around 2 years ago during the Pride celebrations in Vancouver I happened to attend the drag performance of the performer who will be performing at the event, Shay Dior. I was just really blown away by the performances of Shay and her House of Rice, where she is the den mother of all these queer Asian drag performers. When we were brainstorming what would be the main event for CASCA, I suggested drag. And Sue Frohlick did too. That’s the reason we featured this as our event.

There will be a 50-minute panel discussion there will be a presentation by Shaka McGlotten on their book, Dragging, in the Drag of a Queer Life (2019), then Nishant Upadhyay will be presenting via Zoom, and then Shay Dior will be talking about their own engagement with Drag. Then we’ll have an hour and a half of performance.

Q: Given that the conference theme encourages us to consider the “sedimented histories” of anthropology, can you tell us a little about the history of anthropology’s engagement with drag?

Anthropology, and especially queer anthropology, has a long engagement with drag. Esther Newton’s Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972) was precisely about drag. Her work was quite pivotal because it was foreshadowing the notion of gender as performative, that very important queer scholars such as Judith Butler developed in their book Gender Trouble (1990). That’s the notion of gender that I think most people in humanities and social sciences including anthropologists now engage with. So this is a happy coincidence between the popularity of drag and drag as foundational to queer anthropology.

Q It’s over 50 years since the publication of Mother Camp.  What has changed in drag? What would Newton observe as different about drag today? 

I think that’s the core of the question about this event. What is drag? How’s it changed? And how has its place in queer anthropology changed? Drag is not my special area of focus but as a Queer anthropologist I do engage with these questions.

When you’re looking at Esther Newton’s work, she’s really looking at the role of performance in relation to gender and class. So in her work she’s looking at these two groups, the so-called ‘coverts’ and ‘overts’ of homosexuals. It’s a very class-based and bound binary. The ‘overts’ are the street drag performers and the coverts are the ones who actually perform on the stage as part of a performance, but in their personal or private lives, the coverts do not cross-dress or have a persona of the ‘opposite sex’ or gender. Both groups have a facility of wit as part of a broad repertoire of camp.

More recently, the way that scholars in queer of color critique have engaged with drag is through canonical work like “Paris is Burning” (1990), the documentary film by Jenny Livingston about Black and Brown, trans and gay subjects in Harlem in the eighties and early nineties performing drag. For them, the kind of drag that’s performed is quite different from the one that is performed by the white working class or middle class men that Newton is talking about. For these Black Brown subjects, drag is not about over exaggerating features of femininity in an ironic way. It’s not gender that is foregrounded but rather much more class and race. And it’s not about exaggerating and mocking in a very flamboyant way these idealized notions of femininity but rather learning how to pass in their everyday life as a middle-class or wealthy person of the ‘opposite sex’. So there’s a very different concern about what drag is. It’s about survival and developing survival strategies and using events like ‘the ball’ [from “Paris is Burning”] to create a sense of community based on competition, but competition designed to hone these survival skills that minoritized and racialized subjects need in order to remain alive within society. Films like “Paris is Burning” are canonical queer texts, just like Esther Newton’s was, but in a different way. They were foregrounding race as well as the class that Esther Newton did.

From “Paris is Burning,” now you’ve got people like RuPaul and RuPaul’s Drag Race which has been syndicated in at least seven countries including Canada and Thailand. You can see how with the popularization of drag through RuPaul’s Drag Race that many aspects of this queer Black and Latino culture that were part of the subcultures in New York City has been taken up and become mainstream. Terms like “throwing shade” and being “fierce” and “vogueing” have now become part of popular everyday lexicon. But along with this popularization of drag has come a much more critical look at drag.

There’s been historically the assumption that men dressing up as women and exaggerating certain features of femininity is inherently transgressive. And that’s no longer the case, so you are seeing more discussions about the politics of drag. One of the speakers who will be presenting, Nishant Upadhyay, has written about how within drag there is often times a reproduction of both sexism and racial stereotypes as well as complicity with white settler colonial ideals in the performances that certain drag performers enact.

Q: Can you tell us more about Shay Dior’s place in this history?

I was really kind of blown away by Shay Dior and the House of Rice because it wasn’t the kind of typical drag shows that I saw performed by some white cis gay men where femininity was really mocked, and they relied on jokes that could be potentially ageist, or sizeist, or lookist. They took performance to a different level of performance art.

One phrase Shay Dior who was MCing that night used that stayed in my mind was this notion of ‘Asian excellence’. There’s this kind of rhetoric about the rise of Asia and of the 21st Century being “the Asian age”. This is a very conservative discourse. The whole notion of Asian values is used as a counter discourse to the hegemonic Western values of liberalism, defending the authoritarian cultures of late developmental states like Singapore, China or South Korea or Taiwan, etc. But the way that Shay was using the term Asian excellence is that you’re now seeing the public visibility of Asian talent in unprecedented ways that goes beyond the model minority stereotype of Asians being in the fields of technology, science, or medicine. They’ve moved into a lot of the cultural spaces that are still quite dominated by the Black-White binary in the Euro-American context. You have people like Michelle Yeoh in the film “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” which won seven Academy Awards. You also have Shohei Ohtani who’s considered one of the best baseball players. Never mind the popularity of K-pop and hip hop groups like BTS.  So you have this newfound visibility of Asians and I think that’s where she situates the kind of drag performances that she and her family do.

Q: We’re hoping there will be many undergraduate and graduate students in attendance at the conference and at this event in particular. What do you think they might take away from this event? 

The reason drag is such a powerful pedagogical site is because it’s part of the popular culture. These are things that students are already engaging with within their everyday lives when they come into our anthropology classes. Drag and popular culture in general are such great ways to engage with broader questions of colonialism and race because the students are already engaged with them on very emotional and affective and aesthetic levels. I find drag and, more broadly, popular culture to be powerful sites for students to engage with these larger structures that they otherwise find too abstract to understand.

Drag specifically and gender more broadly has also been politicized as part of the rise of far right conservative groups. You see this in the United States with anti-trans bathroom laws or states forbidding drag performances. You also see this in Alberta with new gender policies that would require parental consent for use of names and pronouns different from those assigned at birth.   Gender and drag are really part of this current political moment. And this is where drag becomes a really rich site that provides a window into how power is shifting in late modernity. My investment in these debates is that we really need to look at drag critically, and we need to bring in an anti-colonial transnational perspective that takes into consideration the intersection of gender, sexuality, and geopolitics.

References Cited:
Newton, Esther. Mother camp: Female impersonators in America. University of Chicago Press, 1979.