Beatriz Preciado Friday, 14th of November 2003 9:15 am-6:15 pm FSE- 117 bvd de la Libération, Saint-Denis, locaux de la FIDE

[ENGLISH]

The Drag King Workshop aims to explore through (feminist, post-feminist and queer) collective practice the performative construction of masculinity, its social and body benefits, and its possibilities for political action.
Participants learn to perform masculinity and experience differential access to public space and to public use of speech. This performative practice has three main goals. First, from a critical point of view, it aims to make manifest the constructed character of masculinity. Second, the workshop tries to generate a form of political action and visibility for women alternative to traditional essentialist feminis, a form of action that enables the subversive re-citation of certain cultural codes of masculinity.
Finally, the Drag King Workshop is an experience of collective empowerment, of political and sexual joy for women, dykes, transgenders and transexual women.
The workshop, to use an expression from Félix Guattari, is an exercise of "micropolitics of the cells" in which we learn to collectively rework the performative technologies of inscription of gender codes within body memory and action.
As a theoretical background, this workshop aims to map out the rhetoric of gender to explain how the artistic and theatrical notion of "performance" came to be used in the nineties by queer theory to de-naturalise sexual difference. We will study the critical use of gender performance within feminism of the seventies and eighties (Woman House Projet, Adrian Piper, Diane Torr, Martha Rosler, etc.), the crystalisation of "camp aesthetics" and "btuch/fem" culture based on the stylisation of certain gender codes. We will try to bring up the theoretical context in which drag king culture has emerged: during the nineties, various feminist and lesbian authors, such as Judith Butler or Sue-Ellen Case, proposed a definition of gender in terms of performance in response to both the essentialist feminist idea of a natural sexual truth and the concept of sexual difference as an imposed norm of certain forms of masculinity and femininity.
Later, Eve K. Sedgwick and Butler herself redefined gender identity as being a result of the "repetition of performative invocations of the heterosexual norm."
This double critique which could be characterized as a "performative turn" has led to new interpretations of gender and sexuality in both political and aesthetic terms. Finally, we will try to evaluate the use of drag king performance as a political instrument in contemporary feminist and queer activism.

The workshop ends with a Drag King party (location to be determined).

Inscription

The workshop is open to women, lesbians, transgenders and transexual women.
The inscription is free and could be done Thrusday 13th of November at 117 bvd de la Libération or sending an email to preciado@princeton.edu.

Participants must bring male clothing and underwear and any accessories that they deem necessary or appropriate for the drag king performance.


Biblio/filmo- graphy

Gabriel Baur, Venus' Boyz, 2001. (Performances: Dred Gerestand, Diane Torr, Mo B Dick, Murray Hill, etc.)
Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, Routledge, New York, 1994.
Marie-Hélène Bourcier, Queer Zones, Balland, Paris, 2001.
Marie-Hélène Bourcier, "Des "femmes travesties" aux pratiques transgenres: repenser et queeriser le travestissement," in Queer Zones, Politiques des identités sexuelles, de représentations et des savoirs, Paris, Balland, 2001, pp. 153-172.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York, Routledge, 1990, "Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade," pp. 43-57.
Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul, Beacon, Boston, 1996.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Durham, 1998.
Judith Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano, Drag King Book, 1999.
Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan, Acting Out: Feminist Peformances, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Cathie Opie, Photographic works.
Beatriz Preciado, Manifeste Contra-Sexuel, Editions Balland, Paris, 2000.
Miriam Shapiro, Judith Chicago, Nancy Spero, Sandy Orgel, The Woman House Project, 1970-1.
Diane Torr, Drag King Workshop, 1996.
Monika Treut, Gendernautes, 2001.
Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind, 1982. La pensé straight, Paris, Balland, 2001.