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Conceptions
of gender and sexuality of Drag Kings in Switzerland
Eveline
Nay
Pädagogisches
Institut
Universität
Zürich,
Switzerland
This paper examines
conceptions of gender and sexuality of Drag Kings from a
feminist and queer perspective. Practices and narratives
of gender and sexualities are analysed and related to
terms like transgender, transsexuality, gender crossing
and gender fucking. Based on an qualitative-empirical
study of Drag Kings in Switzerland this paper examines the
(re)production and transgressions of hegemonial
representations of gender identity, sex and sexuality
within spaces of so called privacy and publicity, of the
lesbian and gay community and of transgender and queer
culture.
Heteronormativity as
introduced by Micheal Warner is a central theoretical
concept for the analysis of the narratives and practices
of gender and sexuality of Drag Kings. Starting from
Michel Foucault’s geneology of sexuality it refers to
Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix and focuses on the
relation and handling of the sexual binary and
identitarian positions of Drag Kings within this symbolic
order.
The (re)production of
positions of power by Drag Kings and the relation herein
to a hegemonial masculinity theoretised by Reawyn Connell
will be explored. The body practices of different forms of
‘kinging’ refer to the symbolic order of gender and
sexuality and has political implications such as identity
politics as well as politics of transgression of symbolic
categories in terms of queerness and otherness.
About Eveline Nay
Eveline Nay was born in
1974 in Switzerland. She studied Educational Sciences,
Russian Literature and Sciences of Special Education at
the University of Zurich. M.A. in 2005 with a thesis about
the Gender Conceptions of Drag Kings in Switzerland.
Further is a central empirical research project of her the
analysis of selfconceptions of women loving women and
lesbians in Graubünden, a rural part of Switzerland, in
historical as well as in contemporary representations. She
lives in Zurich and works as a phd-student, research
associate and lecturer at the Institute of Educational
Sciences at the University of Zurich. Main Interests:
Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Transgender Issues and
Qualitative Research Methods.
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