Ph.D. / M.A. Program in Linguistics
Sociolinguistics Lunch Lecture Series – Spring 2018
Bodies That Touch and Walk:
Bodies That Touch and Walk:
Some Notes on Gender and Multimodality
in Drag King Workshops
Luca Greco
University Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle
Based on an ethnography conducted on drag king workshops in Brussels (Belgium) on multimodal construction of queer masculinities in interaction, this presentation will deal with the constitutive role played by touch and walk in the construction and the deconstruction of gender in bodily transformation practices.
Drag kings are generally female assigned persons who embody a male character in pursuing a personal desire to explore gender(s), for the sake of performance, and within a political agenda against the binary dimension of gender. Drag king workshops are social occasions in which novices transform their bodies with the help of leaders (particularly those knowledgeable in bodily transformation practices), through the mobilization of specific tactile practices in make-up activities, and through some exercises in which they experiment how to walk in gendered and innovative ways.
My analysis focuses on these two aspects of drag king workshops. It is situated in gender studies inspired by queer and new materialisms perspectives (Butler 1993, Alamo & Hekman 2008, Barad 2012) and in the field of multimodality inspired by the works of Charles and Marjorie Goodwin (2017, 2006). This study aims to show the haptic and mobile dimensions of gender, traditionally neglected in gender and queer studies. Moreover, it proposes to consider multimodal practices as political and artistic ones as they are indexing new ways to consider bodies and genders through the lens of imagination, creativity and improvisation and as they are marked by the bodily experiences of subjects.
Date: Friday, April 13, 2018
Time: 2:00 – 4:00 PM Room: 9207
