Conexi´ on de conectores (Smart Plugs)

Because of my subject matter, I blend traditional ethnography, virtual ethnography (through social media), and media studies in the methodology for this dissertation. Most of the material is rooted in traditional ethnography—being physically present in a place and talking to people—

supplemented by virtual conversations at times. But media studies also plays a significant role in that drag constantly references television, film, popular music, politics, and celebrity gossip. In addition to this direct influence, television has indirectly shaped the ethnographic material because I chose my field sites based on regional drag styles shown on RuPaul’s Drag Race. My choice of the Blue Moon in Pittsburgh as a primary ethnographic field site was based on what I perceived as the novelty of Sharon Needles’ drag on Season 4 of Drag Race. Sharon used cheap materials, referenced horror movies, and explicitly stood up for transgender people during her time on Drag Race. The combination of all these atypical (for Drag Race contestants) behaviors, as well as Sharon’s references to a home bar and group of queens like her, led me to believe that something significant—and something critical of the prevailing aesthetic on Drag Race—was happening with drag in Pittsburgh. That Sharon specifically spoke in opposition to body-essentialist binary gender, articulating trans-inclusive queer politics, especially piqued my interest because Drag Race policy until the current season (Season 9) has excluded trans women.⁸¹

After choosing the Blue Moon as a primary field site and realizing that I would be writing a good deal about aesthetics and politics set explicitly in opposition to Drag Race, I reasoned

81 Laurie Norris, “Of Fish and Feminists: Homonormative Misogyny and the Trans* Queen,” in The Makeup of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows, Jim Daems, ed. (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2014), pp.

13-30.

that I should have a second field site where performances adhere to RuPaul’s preferred aesthetic.

After talking to some friends in the Washington, DC gay community, I decided to make DC my secondary field site because Tatianna (Drag Race Season 2) regularly performs at a bar there, and her style of drag is one of the preferred local aesthetics. I also grew up in the DC area, which meant I had to do somewhat less background research on geography, audience demographics, and localized behavioral norms in gay bars than I would have needed had I chosen an entirely unfamiliar field site as my secondary.

Washington, DC also proved to be an apt choice as a second field site because of differences in performer and audience demographics between venues there and venues in Pittsburgh. Where Pittsburgh’s drag performers and audiences are overwhelmingly white, DC venues often feature artists of color performing for white audiences. In addition to these racial dynamics, a significant portion of audience members in DC are straight women who come into drag venues for single events and do not return, while audiences at the Blue Moon tend to be queer people and regular patrons of the bar. These demographic differences contribute to aesthetic and political differences between venues and also influence how performers contextualize their work during shows.

In addition to my primary and secondary field sites, I have done some minor ethnographic work at gay bars in Pittsburgh that cater to different demographics and expectations of drag aesthetics than does the Blue Moon. This has allowed me to situate the Blue Moon’s aesthetics and politics not only in relation to Drag Race-influenced national trends, but also within Pittsburgh. To this end, I have also done some preliminary ethnographic work with drag performers in Cleveland because one of my dissertation committee members suggested that aesthetic and political themes at the Blue Moon are also present in some Cleveland venues.

Though my work in Cleveland is still in the preliminary stages (see Conclusion), it does appear that there are connections between drag at Cocktails in Cleveland and the Blue Moon in Pittsburgh. Whether these connections are based on shared identities and aesthetic considerations across the two venues or are a result of contact between the Pittsburgh and Cleveland scenes is a matter for further research.

When I met performers at my field sites, I was often encouraged to follow them through social media. As a show of support and to facilitate further conversation, I did this, and some of the conversations that informed my writing happened over social media because it is easier to ask and answer questions in a virtual space without the pressure of setting up for a show or shouting over a loud, crowded bar. In addition, social media platforms like Facebook are virtual spaces where performers interact with each other, both in and out of their stage personas. Event pages for drag shows and performers’ profiles often have conversations that show alliances and fault lines in a given community’s aesthetic and political consciousness. Seeing these conversations play out in virtual space allowed me to be more informed when I entered the actual space of the drag show. If there had been an issue, I would know and avoid inflaming any tensions between performers and/or fans.

Social media platforms themselves also play a role in the politics of my ethnographic work. Though Facebook has somewhat relaxed on the policy of late, the platform’s “real name”

rule was being used to target drag queens and trans people a great deal between 2013 and 2015.

Several Blue Moon performers were caught up in Facebook’s enforcement of the “real name”

policy during that time, and they chronicled their interactions with Facebook administrators through their status updates, even as they were outed and forced to change the names on their profiles.

According to people who dealt with Facebook administrators first-hand, the enforcement of the “real name” policy is based on administration receiving a report of a “fake” name and individually tracking down the person who has violated the policy. While the rule was designed to discourage anonymous cyber-bullying through the use of fictitious Facebook accounts, there was someone going through Facebook and specifically targeting drag queens and trans women in several major US cities, including Pittsburgh, for at least two years. As a result, a number of performers were outed and forced to use their legal names on profiles that had formerly been dedicated to their drag personas. This was damaging to their promotional apparatus, as a drag name is a brand and performers are typically not known by their legal names except to friends. In addition, Facebook administration’s insistence on enforcing this policy against the queer community, while allowing other fictitious personas to continue using “fake” names, was potentially dangerous for people who were not out either as drag performers or as transgender to family, colleagues, or other acquaintances.⁸²

Whether they were directly affected by the enforcement of the “real name” policy or not, people in the Facebook queer community were conscious of the threat posed by Facebook’s enforcement of the “real name” rule and mobilized in protest of Facebook’s actions. As part of these protests, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco traveled to Facebook’s main office to discuss the impact of the “real name” policy on queer people and others for whom privacy is a life-or-death concern (e.g. people avoiding abusers and other stalkers). The protests seem to have had some effect in that Facebook is being more reasonable when drag queens and trans people ask to keep names that are not their legal names on their Facebook profiles. Within the last six months, a few Blue Moon performers who were forced to use their legal names on

82 I have a few friends who are not drag artists and use pseudonyms on Facebook to avoid unwanted communication from estranged family members, stalkers, abusers, and the like. Their profiles were not reported for “fake” names.

their drag profiles have changed back to their drag names without incident, though the tone of discussions around this relaxation of the “real name” policy still carries deep distrust of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.⁸³

Because I am aware of the damage that can be done by outing a queer person and because I wish to support and promote the drag artists who appear in my dissertation, I have adopted a

“drag names only” policy for performers in this document. When I began the project in 2012, I was leaning toward such a policy as the safest and most ethical way to write about drag.

Facebook’s actions surrounding their “real name” policy and the impact of those actions on the American queer community strengthened my resolve to use only drag names as a matter of both safety and respect for queer identities and naming practices. Drag performers’ stage names and trans people’s chosen names are real names—even if not recognized as such by the State—and for Facebook (or any other party) to insinuate otherwise is an act of ideological violence against queer people.⁸⁴ In order to combat this ideological violence and to affirm queer identities, I refer to performers and other people in and around drag shows with only their chosen names. The only exception to this “drag names only” policy for performers is Lady J Martinez O’Neal/Jeremiah Davenport. In addition to being a well regarded performer in the Cleveland drag scene, Jeremiah/Lady J is a scholar and historian of drag. I name her in his off-stage identity so that she might be recognized as both an academic and a performer.⁸⁵

In addition to respecting queer naming practices in the ethnographic portions of the text, a significant portion of the theoretical support for the ethnography is drawn from queer authors

83 When reports began to surface of drag queens and trans women being specifically targeted and impacted by the

“real name” policy, Zuckerberg spoke in defense of Facebook’s rule and completely dismissed the concerns of people who had been outed and put in danger by his policy. The queer community, at least in Pittsburgh, has not forgotten this.

84 Butler, Excitable Speech.

85 At Jeremiah’s request, I am deliberately mixing his gender pronouns to reflect her fluid identity.

writing on the fringes and borders of academic discourse. I have done this deliberately, even when more conventional academic sources exist, in order to cite sources that will be accessible to the people cited in the ethnographic episodes of the dissertation, as well as to de-privilege institutionalized, academic queer theory and favor public intellectuals, journalists, and activists writing theories drawn directly from contemporary queer expression. Online sources like Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys blog and the Everyday Feminism blog, with their stated missions of creating accessible, socially critical, intellectual discourse that includes citations, have contributed a great deal to my theories of queer solidarity, nurturance culture, and emotional presence. Using online sources instead of traditionally published academic texts also allows for an immediacy on par with the social media sources that have supplemented my traditional ethnography: because blogs like Feminist Killjoys and Everyday Feminism bypass some of the processes of academic publishing, they can respond much more quickly than Ethnomusicology (e.g.) to current events and emerging forms of queer expression. This immediacy is helpful in theorizing drag artists’ responses to current events because Sara Ahmed and Everyday Feminism’s contributing authors often post their analyses of social issues at about the same time Blue Moon artists reference the same issues in a show.