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Tom Brassington

‘Show Generosity to These Monstrosities’: Investigating the Gothic Dimensions of Drag in the Performance of Sharon Needles and Acid Betty. Tom Brassington. ‘We mock identity.’

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Tom Brassington

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  1. ‘Show Generosity to These Monstrosities’: Investigating the Gothic Dimensions of Drag in the Performance of Sharon Needles and Acid Betty Tom Brassington

  2. ‘We mock identity.’ - E. Alex Jung, ‘RuPaul on How Straight People Steal From Gay Culture and Why Educating Youth Is a Waste of Time’ [interview] http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/rupaul-drag-race-interview.html [accessed 16th, May 2016] • Broadly, drag can be summarised as a performance style that plays with concepts of gender identity, politics, and character tropes. • Drag is a highly nebulous performance style, which works within and plays with pop culture.

  3. Gothic and Drag Intersections • Corporeal Malleability ‘Bodies which do not conform […] which flout conventions of their culture and go without appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes.’ • Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) p. 7 ‘the grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon.’ • Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘“The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources”, from M. M. Bakhtin (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) p. 93 • Artifice to the extreme ‘the essence of Camp is its love of the Unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.’ • Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ <http://tinyurl.com/k2dws47> [accessed 11th, May 2016] • Textual Similarities ‘Gothic is cross-dressing, drag, a performance of textuality’ • Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995) p. 60

  4. Sharon Needles • https://youtu.be/49X1L2kPhmU?t=1350 • ‘to sum up one of my shows is to say they are an example of social and current media anxieties. Or to sum it up the way I would say, “an example to break something with a baseball bat.’ • Sharon Needles, ‘Meet the Queens’, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4 [Promotional Material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009-) • ‘I pull a lot of my drag inspirations from The Nightly News, NPR, PBS, and 5 year olds.’ - Needles, ‘Meet the Queens’

  5. ‘Both the gay icon and the monster are associated with bodies that are overdetermined spectacle.’ • Karen E. Macfarlane, ‘The Monstrous House of Gaga’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (New York & London: Routledge, 2012) p. 115 • ‘it [the body] is also subject to the shape of perception as presented within a socio-historico-cultural context.’ • Nicholas Hope, ‘The Learnt Body: The Body as a Reflection of Socio-Cultural Responses to Landscape’, in Ways of Seeing a Body: Body and Performance, ed. Sandra Reeve (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2013) p. 140 • ‘I’m perverse/I’m preserved/I am forever baby/I am your taxidermy’ - Sharon Needles, ‘Taxidermy’, Taxidermy [M4A] (Los Angeles, CA: Sidecar Records, 2015)

  6. Acid Betty • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vyl_nAteWs • ‘My drag style is very aggressive, very alternative, hyper colour, and glow in the dark.’ • Acid Betty, ‘Meet the Queens’, Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 8 [promotional material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009-) • ‘Do I even impersonate a woman, I wanna pose that question’ - WOWPresents, ‘Season 8 RuPaul’s Drag Race Queens Impersonate Each Other with Kim Chi! Naomi Smalls! BOB! Chi Chi!’ [promotional material], YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vpNr_TOqg> <0:00:15-0:00:18> [accessed 16th, May 2016]

  7. ‘Gothic posits skin primarily as a boundary to be disrupted.’ • Catherine Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) p. 10 • ‘It is our bodies which allow us to act, to intervene in and to alter the daily flow of life.’ • Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 1993; repr. 1994) p. 9 • ‘dress, the body and the self – are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality.’ • Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, p. 10

  8. Conclusions – Celebratory Gothic • ‘They’ll go out and they’ll steal something, and then get dressed up and come to a ball for that one night and live the fantasy.’ • Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston (Miramax, 1991) <0:06:25-0:06:29> • ‘You go in there and you feel… you feel a hundred percent right as being gay.’ • Paris is Burning, <0:04:10-0:04:17> • ‘The drag artist is classical, a failed classicism, just as one of the clichés of Gothicism is the classical temple in ruins.’ - David Bergman, ‘Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric’, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) p. 102 • ‘even gothic failure is a kind of success if it challenges the status quo and insists on behaviors otherwise invisible.’ • George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006) p. 202

  9. Bibliography • Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘“The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources”, from M. M. Bakhtin (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) • Betty, Acid, ‘Meet the Queens’, Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 8 [promotional material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009-) • Bergman, David ‘Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric’, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) p. 102 • Entwistle, Joanne The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) • Haggerty, George E., Queer Gothic (Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006) • Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995) • Hope, Nicholas, ‘The Learnt Body: The Body as a Reflection of Socio-Cultural Responses to Landscape’, in Ways of Seeing a Body: Body and Performance, ed. Sandra Reeve (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2013) • Instagram, ‘acidbetty’, http://www.Instagram.com/acidbetty • Instagram, ‘jamesstjames1’, http://www.Instagram.com/jamesstjames1

  10. Instagram, ‘sharonneedlespgh’, http://www.Instagram.com/sharonneedlespgh • Jung, E. Alex, ‘RuPaul on How Straight People Steal From Gay Culture and Why Educating the Youth Is a Waste of Time’ [Interview] <http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/rupaul-drag-race-interview.html> [accessed 16th, May 2016] • Macfarlane, Karen E., ‘The Monstrous House of Gaga’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (New York & London: Routledge, 2012) • Needles, Sharon, ‘Meet the Queens’, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4 [Promotional Material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009-) • Needles, Sharon, Taxidermy [M4A] (Los Angeles, CA: Sidecar Records, 2015) • Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston (Miramax, 1991) • Shilling, Chris, The Body and Social Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 1993; repr. 1994) • Spooner, Catherine, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) • Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ <http://tinyurl.com/k2dws47> [accessed 11th, May 2016] • WOWPresents, ‘Season 8 RuPaul’s Drag Race Queens Impersonate Each Other with Kim Chi! Naomi Smalls! BOB! Chi Chi! [promotional material] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vpNr_TOqg> [accessed 16th, May 2016]

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