(Re)montando o poder: drag queens e a arte de performar o gênero

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the intersections between drag art and issues of gender, body, and identity, articulating a study on the sensitive dimensions and power relations that traverse the “montações” of drag queens. The study proposes to highlight drag artistry solely for its gender transformation and identity expression, seeking to analyze how, just like drag queens, we, as individuals, also use bodily stylizations and discursive practices to produce our subjective perceptions about genders. Consequently, this work aims to understand how drag art elucidates the sensitive dimensions of power relations that direct subjective processes to biological and binary gender determinations, restricting the being to the male and female assumptions, and how the act of drag itself also enables thinking about identity manifestations that subvert such a dominant logic. Based on the review of Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's theories, this research aims to, while investigating the power relations and their influences on the subjects' subjective processes, understand how the act of drag is intertwined in such sensitive dimensions in order to propose critical effects on the prevailing cisheteronormativity.