Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a multisited ethnography based on observation, participation and video taped interactions of Drag King Workshops in Bruxelles, I will focus on ethnographic and interactional analysis stressing the collective, categorial and normative dimensions of gendered self presentation practices.

Paper long abstract:

A drag king is generally a "female" birth assigned person who dresses in masculine ways for the sake of performance, political agendas, personal self-fulfillment by portraying zir own definition of masculinity in order to disrupt borders between masculinity and femininity and create dissonant genders and bodies.

Drawing from a multisited ethnography based on observation, participation and video taped interactions of Drag King Workshops in Bruxelles, I will focus on ethnographic and interactional analysis stressing the collective, categorial and normative dimensions of gendered self presentation practices.

Through detailed analysis of interactions between praticipants in drag king workshops, I will show, in a first time, how drag kings are less oriented to construct a « male » character than a dissonant gender and body where female to male transition experiences are coalesced into feminism and lesbianism and where elements of masculinity are meshed to feminity in a polyphonic (vs. monolithic) self.

Finally, I will show how the construction of a dissonant body and of a polyphonic self has political and categorial issues in that it undermines binary ideologies and an essentialist vision of categories. This point could shed a light to recent debates and works on incoherence (post-) feminism » (Noble 2006), ethnography of transgender categories (Valentine 2007) and a a praxeological perspective on female masculinities (Halberstam 1998, Noble 2004).