When does one start thinking about performance? Or how do we use ‘performance’ as a mode of thinking? These are the questions the students of CSIS 450 faced as they were tasked with contributing to this anthology on the field of performance studies. This digital book offers a collection of essays developed by students in CSIS 450: Topics in Critical Studies in Sexuality at the University of British Columbia – Vancouver Campus. These essays are the outputs of a course assignment using a set of teaching and learning practices that involve open educational resources and students-as-creators, a practice known as open pedagogy.

The course introduces students to different frameworks and lenses to look at performances that defy gender and sexual normativity in different parts of the globe. It invites students to investigate how “drag” can simultaneously reflect, reinforce, and resist ideologies from mainstream cultures and look for instances of queer joyful defiance and gender euphoria in gender-bending popular public performances. Students also learn to acknowledge the moments in which cross-dressing serves as a means of reinforcing normativity and policing gender identities, sexualities, and embodiments. This collection of essays is a culmination of the students’ learning throughout the course and their effort to openly share what they have learned in a visual and textual format. From the course title “Drag Around the World,” the students have expanded their notion of what they view as performance—exploring various modes of performances which one would witness and experience in everyday life—by examining how their chosen aesthetic objects are analyzed.

The key here is all about framing a performance. In Performance, performance scholar Diana Taylor attunes our attention to how one could frame something as a performance. This is where the confusion that “is everything a performance” becomes apparent and then enlightened. As Richard Schechner writes, the is and as dichotomy of framing a performance as is or as is indeed crucial, with the former as descriptive and the latter as analytical. (Schechner 1985) The performance responds to the activities showcased on a stage with an audience: theatre, sports, recital, opera, and concert. But when we apply the approach as performance, it gives us the possibility of treating any event, aesthetic praxis, and phenomenon as a performance. There is now slippage that anything could be analyzed as a performance, but the question we are more invested in is asking whether such a “thing” is worth analyzing.  Thus, the “framing” and the “performance” are two considerations the contributors factored into their essays. The performance object of analysis is indeed critical for students as it needs to be of interest yet relevant to the course’s theme. The course’s main objective is to explore how not only femininity and/or masculinity are being recreated, reaffirmed, or mocked in different performances, but also ideas (and ideals) about race, class, body shapes and abilities, national and local belonging, and ethnicity.

This collection of essays is a “point-in-time” in the process of students learning, understanding, and engaging with complex topics of gender and sexuality identity. Student contributors signed an author agreement allowing their work to be shared openly online. Some names and identities were protected using pseudonyms; however, positionality statements have been included in many of the chapters to better understand the context and lenses from which the authors engage with the material and construct their essays. We begin with Emerson Boldt’s essay, which examines RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4 contestant Milan through an intersectional lens of resistance in mainstream drag culture. Next, Lauren de Vries explores the notion of camp in Noel Gruber’s performance, Noel’s Lament. ​​Jared Khalifa offers an essay that focuses on how the non/wearing of leotards has been used as a political statement in women’s gymnastics. Jules Kyi provides an examination of how drag performances in Myanmar become a platform for anti-authoritarian resistance. A comparative reading of Sasha Colby’s influence on the drag competition Miss Continental will be offered by Clarke59. There will also be a chapter on archival research on condom use in the 1980s based on gay erotica book Entertainment for a Master (1986) by John Preston. Aidan Pau highlights the importance of the drag king scene in Vancouver as they gravitate towards the BOOK DRAG KINGS project by Vancouver-based drag kings. Lastly, xinze wang explores the notion of gender performance as embodied in East Asian cosplayers. Due to the wide range of aesthetic objects student contributors engaged with, the performances offered here are not only the ‘matter’ of the course. Instead, the students need to explore and demonstrate how their respective performances ‘matter.’ And now, it is time for us to raise the curtains.

References

Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Taylor, Diana. Performance. Translated by Abigail Levine, Duke University Press, 2016.