When Scenes Fade: Everyday Investments in Sydney's Drag King Culture

Abstract

Drag kinging refers to a consciously enacted masculinity by women (and sometimes other gender diverse individuals) within the recognisable context of a performance. While drag king culture has links to a longer tradition of live performance, drag king events were significant within the local lesbian social circuit in Sydney, Australia. Functioning as a site for a range of social activities generated in the vicinity of the performances, a series of drag king events between 2002 and 2012 provide the opportunity to explore the connection between social experience and collective consciousness as it becomes an intelligible cultural phenomenon. My research represents a departure from existing literature on drag king culture that works within the analytic categories of performer and audience. Instead of using the established framework derived from performance studies on one hand and a theoretical account of gender performativity on the other, I deploy cultural studies methodologies to reframe Sydney’s localised version as a scene. Analysing the interactive narratives between research participants in a series of focus group discussions, alongside my own experiences as a scene participant over a five year period, I offer a close examination of how everyday encounters coalesce around drag king events. From this data, I demonstrate the relationship of the individual to the collective, triangulate embodied intimacy to social, sexual and political configurations, and reveal the scene’s constitutive and representative dimensions. Whereas I was initially drawn to the scene’s charged particularity, in the end I had to confront its passing. Sydney’s drag king scene has all but disappeared in comparison to its vibrancy when I began my study. In offering the perspective of a scene ethnographically captured in the moment of its demise, my research reveals the complex process by which a contemporary social moment becomes layered with historical investment. In doing so, I bring together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the archive. Overall, this research offers insight into the lifecycle of scenes: their emergence, to their expansion or contraction and, inevitably, their fading.