Dragging Out (In)Difference: Explorations of the Cultural and Affective Politics of Drag Queens' Performances in Toronto, Canada

This dissertation is both an ethnographic and autoethnographic meditation on theaffective, cultural, and national politics of drag performance amongst drag queens and other “feminine-expressing/presenting” drag performers in Toronto, Canada. Based on 24 months of fieldwork within various queer urban spaces and drag performance contexts as both an ethnographer and occasional drag performer, I contend that the politics of drag performance in Toronto escapes any singular designation as socio-politically transgressive, regressive, or reificatory. Drawing on the concept of “indifference to difference” popularized by queer of colour scholars Madhavi Menon (2015) and Naisargi Dave (2022; 2023), I maintain that despite drag’s characteristic emergence within a context of gendered differentiation, its most basic performative production might be a nascent politics of “indifference to difference” which within the markedly multicultural Canadian national context has the potential to trouble the nation’s adherence to a ubiquitous pro-nationalist identity politic fixated on defining and delimiting difference. This dissertation moves beyond previous scholarly examinations of drag performances’ ability to destabilize or obscure conventional distinctions between culturally dominant conceptions of masculinity/femininity, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and ii theatricality/reality, to, more importantly, investigate how drag’s politics of “indifference to difference” offers the equally viable possibility of disturbing the boundaries and borders between more nuanced and vital affective and ontologically-oriented oppositions (such as those between constructs of love/hate, desire/disgust, labour/play, and the ordinary/extraordinary) which underpin formations of gendered, sexual, ethnoracial, and national politics within Canada’s white settler colonial and multicultural milieu. Each chapter of this dissertation acts as an interrogation of a pervasive binary that continues to haunt academic deliberations on the politics and practice of “drag queening” or “feminine-expressing/presenting” drag performance, illustrating how drag’s production of a politics of “indifference to difference” permits performers and spectators alike to temporarily break away from the rigid distinctions that structure their sociocultural worlds, resulting in a space where the boundaries demarcating difference can be constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed in a manner that speaks to drag’s complicated, convoluted, and multiplicious political potentialities. Alongside this, this study acts as a novel intervention into contemporary conversations around the growing anti-drag sentiment within the Canadian (and broader North American) context.

Department dc:contributor.department

Anthropology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Nixon, Kevin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dave, Naisargi N

• Affect Theory
• Drag
• Indifference
• Multiculturalism
• Performative Politics
• Queer Theory

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/140264

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/140264