"Who's here for local drag?": Community, Identity, and Remix in Seattle's Drag Scene

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021In this dissertation, I examine the way Seattle drag artists embody the practice of remix through live and digital performance, weaving together sound, visual references, history, politics, gender, body, and affect in creative ways that both entertain audiences and make critical space for marginalized queer identities within the broader performance scene of Seattle. Besides applying remix theory (Navas 2012) in a novel way to the ephemera of live performance, I also use José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification (1999) to understand how drag artists work “within-and-against” the dominant ideologies that marginalize them. This dissertation adds a critical perspective to drag studies in the way it blends critical media studies and queer theory with self-reflexive ethnographic work. My work is based on over a decade of involvement in drag cultures around the United States, but is focused on two years of fieldwork conducted between 2019-2020 in Seattle, where I participated in the local drag scene both as an audience member and as a drag artist. The international popularity of the televised drag reality competition, RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present), has resulted in a massive influx of public interest, capital, and tourism in the queer public spaces. In chapter 1, I discuss how Seattle drag artists negotiate the hegemony of mainstream drag culture, using alternative drag as a method to queer normative ideas of gender, body, and vocality to make critical space for their communities. In chapter 2, I continue this discussion in the context of queer public space in Seattle, looking to how drag artists navigate the politics of space and identity within performance venues. Drawing from Annemarie Bean’s notion of performative containment (2001), I use chapter 3 to trace the history of cross-gender performance from minstrelsy and vaudeville to drag to discuss how Seattle artists approach the troubled legacy of spectacularized performances of race and gender. In chapter 4, I offer a model of how remix theory can be applied beyond the examination of sonic artifacts to the ephemera of live performance, attending to the ways drag artists physically embody the practice of remix. The timing of my research encompassed several tumultuous events that profoundly impacted the communities that comprise Seattle’s drag scene. In chapter 5, I look to the ways Seattle drag artists channeled the spirit of resistance from their queer forebears, deploying remix to critique the Trump administration, respond to threats from local far-right political groups, and participate in the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Finally, I use chapter 6 to show how drag artists utilized digital performance during the ongoing lockdown enacted to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, creating imaginative visions of queer futurity (Muñoz 2009) to inspire hope and uplift their communities