Within a robust field of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological scholarship in gender and sexuality, only recently has a focus of study significantly expanded to consider the sociocultural and linguistic practices of the drag community as a part of the wider gay community. (e.g. Barrett 1998, 2017; Calder 2016; Mann 2011) Such research frequently discusses issues of linguistic features and styles, performativity, and interactions between gender and race of male-bodied drag performers dressing in exaggerated ways as female to subvert gender norms and perform in various contexts. However, biologically female performers similarly exaggerating gendered expectations and performing as female in drag settings have recently begun to proliferate as well. Called ‘bioqueens’ – to reference performing as the same gender in which they were biologically assigned at birth – these performers provide a marked challenge to the nature of what many feel drag is originally intended to encompass.
This presentation aims to explore the growing community of bioqueens in a medium-sized city in the Western United States to investigate language patterns, performativity, and ideologies in the area’s drag community. Strong ideologies and social practices exist that create challenges for bioqueens to succeed and establish themselves in the local scene. In this presentation, I utilize ethnographic as well as visual and discourse analytic methods to examine the interactional, linguistic, and cultural patterns that are found in the drag community both from bioqueens themselves and among male-bodied drag queens reacting to the female-bodied performers in the scene, illustrating the amplified ways bioqueens must negotiate and justify their presence in the drag and LGBTQ+ communities.
Keywords: identity, ideologies, ethnography, drag, bioqueen
References
Barrett, R. (1998). Markedness and styleswitching in performances by African American drag queens. Codes and consequences: Choosing linguistic varieties, 139-161.
Barrett, R. (2017). From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures. Oxford University Press.
Calder, J. (2016). Hand/s/ome women: the role of/s/in multi-modal gender performances among SoMa drag queens. New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 45.
Simmons, N. (2014). Speaking like a queen in RuPaul’s drag race: Towards a speech code of American drag queens. Sexuality & Culture, 18(3), 630-648.
