Alien Femininities: Transcending Gender through Drag in an Aesthetically Restrictive Culture.
| dc.contributor.advisor | Pascoe, CJ | |
| dc.contributor.author | Herrera, Andrea | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-09-24T17:18:40Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-09-24T17:18:40Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-09-24 | |
| dc.description.abstract | In this dissertation, I conceptualize femininities not as a static category of gender performance, but as a set of shifting configurations of dress, cosmetics, bodily comportment, and behaviors inflected by race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, body size/shape, and facial beauty. Non-cisgender-male drag queens who embody exaggerated forms of femininity defend their contested participation in drag culture by defining drag as a multi-gender queer culture based on the staged exaggeration of quotidian gender, against mainstream definitions of drag as the cross-gender performance of a (cis) man dressing up as a (cis) woman. Because these queens are subject to sex-gendered double standards for the intracultural legitimation of their temporary accomplishment of the queer gender Drag Queen, many queens incorporate stylistic elements based on aliens and other fantastical creatures as a form of aesthetic overcompensation to preempt critiques from audiences and cis male drag queens. The embodiment of alien femininities also enables the participants in this research to temporarily transcend cultural restrictions on aesthetics and self-presentation, especially those based on quotidian gender, which they conceptualize through a framework of trans-inclusionary gender essentialism. Through this discourse of gender, participants and I consider together the political potentialities of femme, a quotidian queer gender, and alien femininities, a temporarily-embodied queer gender, excavating a ripple-effect theory of social change in which feelings at the micro level animate interactional and (sub)cultural shifts at the meso level which then ripple outward and upward to restructure and, hopefully, help dismantle systems of normalizing power at the macro level. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25653 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Aliens | en_US |
| dc.subject | Drag | en_US |
| dc.subject | Drag Queens | en_US |
| dc.subject | Embodiment | en_US |
| dc.subject | Femininities | en_US |
| dc.subject | Femme | en_US |
| dc.title | Alien Femininities: Transcending Gender through Drag in an Aesthetically Restrictive Culture. | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Sociology | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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