Wednesday night was colloquially known as âDyke Night â in the inner-city suburb of Newtown in Sydney, Australia. Promoted through alternative media outlets and spread by word-of-mouth, the nightâs popularity was evident from the groups of women seen weaving their way through the congested sidewalks that linked the numerous bars and pubs strategically courting their patronage on this one night of the week. At around 10 p.m., scores of these women made the trek from the main entertainment precinct to The Sly Fox Hotel, a local bar approximately a fifteen-minute walk away. They were heading to an event that hosted drag king performances which, repeated every week for over a decade, became the basis of a thriving local scene.
Drag kinging is a cultural practice in which individuals (conventionally women but also transgender , non-binary and other gender diverse people) consciously enact forms of masculinity within the context of a performance. As a globally recognised phenomenon, a drag king performance has links to a longer tradition of live performances of gendered and sexual expression. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of regular attendees at local events , drag king cultures are equally significant as a social practice. As many of us who went to these sorts of nights can attest, events hosting drag king performances also facilitate diverse modes of participation at the level of everyday life, with women drinking, dancing, and socialising long after the last performance of the evening. So while this is a scene constituted by the drag king as representative of the type of spectacularity required to bring people to sites of urban sociality, it is also one where the seemingly mundane practices that render it meaningful to those who turned up week after week largely took place away from the stage. As such, drag king events were capable of absorbing and reflecting a range of deeply felt investments to a uniquely lesbian-inflected quality established by the atmosphere of being together. Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures takes the spectacle of the drag king as an opportunity for a more critical inquiry into a lesbian social scene that took form over the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
This book is concerned with the process by which scenes come into being through everyday forms of sociality that intersect within, and form the basis of, a recognisable entity. How did the series of drag king events in Sydney generate, mediate, and represent relations between individual participants as a scene? The question of what a scene might be drew me down further lines of inquiry that address the connections between individual experience and collective meaning. How, for example, did individual desire for drag kings materially manifest as a condition of coming together? How did those conditions relate to investments made to a sense of collective cohesion that animated ephemeral encounters , giving unity and meaning to everyday life? And how did such forms of investment become or remain meaningful beyond their original inception in spectacular moments of intensification, such as those provided by drag king performances? While these questions serve as the central focus for this bookâthat is, an exploration of how drag king events operated as a specific site in which different investments to lesbian social formations were articulated and enactedâthey also raise alternative points of investigation that go beyond description and analysis of the pull of the performances alone. Ultimately, I am concerned with how investments in lesbian social identity and practice intersected to produce meaningful modes of engagement for its participants as a condition of relationality. Perhaps the strongly held sensations of desire between the drag king and his fans take shape not so much as a unilateral response to the performances on stage than to more powerful, yet fleeting, impressions of togetherness in those hot, crowded spaces ?
But what happens when scenes fade, as they invariably do?
Ephemeral Sociality
Most lesbian historiography published over recent decades has the implicit or explicit aim of bringing lesbian life into focus. These histories have been influenced by the gay liberation emphasis on visibility, and the personal and political investments made in transforming cultures of silence to affirmation. The rhetoric of visibility motivates many gay and lesbian historical projects that sought to preserve oral histories and personal accounts as part of the demarcation of a newly liberated world against what it meant to be gay in those earlier âtwilightâ years of âshameful desiresâ (Clark 2005). For this reason, many accounts of lesbian social cultures focus on those decades before gay liberation (Chenier 2004; Jennings 2015; Johnson 1996; Kennedy and Davis 1994; Thorpe 1997) . 1
But silence, as Rebecca Jennings (2015) remarks in her study of lesbian social scenes in Sydney between 1930 and 1978, remains at the core of investigating same-sex intimacy. Jenningsâ study explores the impact of silence on lesbian life during this period, arguing that it operated as a disciplinary mechanism to prevent the formation of a recognisable lesbian subjectivity. Such silence, she argues, meant that women had very few words to constitute themselves as lesbian, perpetuating the myth of social tolerance in the absence of a public discourse on non-normative identity . While this is a valuable argument that centres womenâs experiences historically , more can be said of the complicated relationship between silence and ephemerality in the contemporary era. Perhaps it is not so much the absence of language that intervenes in the description of collective life, as Jennings suggests of those earlier times, but the presumed insignificance of certain modes of social experience that render them invisible? LGBTIQ cultures are now expected to be capable of voicing, and making heard, the importance of their own lived experience. Yet, forms of erasure continues to have a defining impact on lesbian life in the twenty-first century, leaving âapparitionalâ (Castle 1993) rather than institutional traces of their existence.
Capturing the ephemerality of experience lies at the heart of this exploration into Sydneyâs local drag king culture . Minority social groups can be especially vulnerable if they lack the kind of mainstream attention that guarantees their external existence in formal institutional archives, given how such archives legitimatise and preserve established social hierarchies (Edenheim 2013). But queer theorists tend to view institutional archival practices as somewhat incompatible with what they see as a more affective history of unstable ephemera that characterises LGBTIQ life (Cvetkovich 2003; Halberstam 2005; Love 2007; Muñoz 2009). There is, regrettably, little material evidence generated about Sydneyâs drag king scene that can be said to be insulated against the passage of time and the vagaries of individual collection. At the same time, the impermanency of lesbian social sites lends urgency to the archival process. The ânever forgetâ determinations that Ann Cvetkovich (2002) identifies in the motivation that often accompanies queer archival practices is complicated by the difficulty in recording and preserving a culture already impacted by the invisibility that often surrounds womenâs same-sex intimacy. This is especially pertinent when such intimacy is intertwined with the seemingly insignificant social interactions that form the backdrop of scene activity .
A sense of urgency was certainly my motivation for commencing this project on the documentation and preservation of scene stories. But at the time of formally starting this work, I had no idea that in just three years the scene would all but disappear. This meant shifting focus from documenting encounters taking place in the present to addressing a social phenomenon in the process of disappearing. This shift turned out to be a defining moment, forcing me to confront the theoretical and practical considerations of ephemerality in ways that I hadnât anticipated. How, for example, do I trace the intimate investments that might be implied, but not necessarily expressed at the time, within drag king even...