Papers by Cameron Crookston
TDR: The Drama Review
With Covid-19 closure of performance spaces, drag performers were in a unique position due to the... more With Covid-19 closure of performance spaces, drag performers were in a unique position due to the historic relationship between queer performance and recorded media, and the history of LGBTQ2+ community building through social media. Rather than — or perhaps in addition to—constituting a moment of rupture, the sudden phenomenon of digital drag presents a vital moment for revealing the relationship among liveness, media, and citational reproduction in drag’s history.
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 2018
Many contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professio... more Many contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professional identity often presented as incompatible trans identity. However, recent events, such as Facebook’s ‘real names’ issue, and trans drag performer Peppermint’s highly publicized tenure on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present), have put tension on this fairly narrow definition of drag. In this article, I use these recent moments of tension between drag and trans identity as a jumping off point to track the history of the definition of drag as ‘just a job’ and scrutinize the simplicity of this statement. Drawing on the work of trans historian Susan Stryker, theatre historian Laurence Senelick and drag ethnographer Esther Newton, among others, I use both recent and historic moments of convergence and overlap between drag and trans communities to problematize the definition of the two identities as mutually exclusive.
Journal of Homosexuality, 2022
Written and performed by the drag team Jinkx Monsoon and Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells t... more Written and performed by the drag team Jinkx Monsoon and Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells the story of Kitty Witless and Dr. Dan von Dandy, a vaudeville duo whose career was cut short in the 1920s, when they were caught in an avalanche and frozen alive. The conceit of the show is that, during their 90-year hiatus, generations of performers pilfered their songbook and passed them off as their own. Now, they have thawed out and are back to reclaim their intellectual property. In this article, I argue that Kitty and Dan's quest to reclaim queer coded music under the banner of a single queer authorship gives shape and form to the tradition of queer coding, while also creating an affective history and queer origin myth that exposes the queer temporal ethos of nostalgic drag performance.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter ... more When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of ...
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2021
When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter ... more When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.
Journal of Homosexuality , 2021
Written and performed by the drag team Jinkx Monsoon and
Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells t... more Written and performed by the drag team Jinkx Monsoon and
Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells the story of Kitty Witless and
Dr. Dan von Dandy, a vaudeville duo whose career was cut short
in the 1920s, when they were caught in an avalanche and frozen
alive. The conceit of the show is that, during their 90-year hiatus,
generations of performers pilfered their songbook and passed
them off as their own. Now, they have thawed out and are back
to reclaim their intellectual property. In this article, I argue that
Kitty and Dan’s quest to reclaim queer coded music under the
banner of a single queer authorship gives shape and form to the
tradition of queer coding, while also creating an affective history
and queer origin myth that exposes the queer temporal ethos of
nostalgic drag performance.
The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging? , 2021
Since its premier in 2009, RuPaul’s Drag Race has captured the attention and imagination of fans.... more Since its premier in 2009, RuPaul’s Drag Race has captured the attention and imagination of fans. In addition to the enthusiasm and critical acclaim the show has gained from fans and critics, Drag Race has become the subject of scholarship and academic analysis around the world. The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging? joins a conversation that has evolved over ten years in response to a show that has itself grown and changed as the very subject it documents, the art and world of drag, has been transformed radically. despite the subversive potential that Drag Race’s parody of reality television might have offered, critics and scholars almost immediately spotted the danger of adapting a queer artform for mass cultural consumption. Articles that cautioned against the pitfalls of Drag Race’s attempt to thrust drag into the mainstream were among some of the first academic works on the program. Ten years later, the degree to which the question of Drag Race’s relationship to the mainstream grows increasingly urgent. In an effort to sell a commercially viable and politically simplified version of drag, Drag Race has attempted to draw clean, often exclusive lines around what constitutes drag, and in doing so perpetuated transphobic and trans-exclusive elements of drag. What I have curated in this collection is a conversation around Drag Race’s evolution and its impact on the wider culture. In doing so I have attempted to shift the focus from an analysis of the show itself—a worthy project which has and continues to be taken up elsewhere— to an analysis of the influence that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had on fans, artists, and members of queer communities around the world.
Q2Q: Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada, 2018
Early gay liberationists in the US and Canada intentionally modeled the emergent “gay community” ... more Early gay liberationists in the US and Canada intentionally modeled the emergent “gay community” of the 1970s and early 1980s after an ethnic community (Licata 80). However, unlike a racial, ethnic or religious community, queers do not give birth to the next generation. For the most part we are raised by straight people, people who are not members of the queer subculture. So, whereas ethnic communities can use kinship networks and biological lineage to pass down cultural memory and tradition, queers don’t learn about their culture from the people that raise them. Queers have instead sought out “chosen families” and other social networks that can replace or supplement biolegal families of origin to provide support, guidance and provide a link to their shared past. One of the most enduring ways queers have accessed history across generations has been and continues to be drag. This chapter considers how drag mothers and daughters have utilized the concept of the queer chosen family both as a form of queer kinship and a conduit for artistic training and professional development within drag as a performance tradition.
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 2018
Many contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professio... more Many contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professional identity often presented as incompatible trans identity. However, recent events, such as Facebook’s ‘real names’ issue, and trans drag performer Peppermint’s highly publicized tenure on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present), have put tension on this fairly narrow definition of drag. In this article, I use these recent moments of tension between drag and trans identity as a jumping off point to track the history of the definition of drag as ‘just a job’ and scrutinize the simplicity of this statement. Drawing on the work of trans historian Susan Stryker, theatre historian Laurence Senelick and drag ethnographer Esther Newton, among others, I use both recent and historic moments of convergence and overlap between drag and trans communities to problematize the definition of the two identities as mutually exclusive.
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Papers by Cameron Crookston
Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells the story of Kitty Witless and
Dr. Dan von Dandy, a vaudeville duo whose career was cut short
in the 1920s, when they were caught in an avalanche and frozen
alive. The conceit of the show is that, during their 90-year hiatus,
generations of performers pilfered their songbook and passed
them off as their own. Now, they have thawed out and are back
to reclaim their intellectual property. In this article, I argue that
Kitty and Dan’s quest to reclaim queer coded music under the
banner of a single queer authorship gives shape and form to the
tradition of queer coding, while also creating an affective history
and queer origin myth that exposes the queer temporal ethos of
nostalgic drag performance.
Major Scales, The Vaudevillians, tells the story of Kitty Witless and
Dr. Dan von Dandy, a vaudeville duo whose career was cut short
in the 1920s, when they were caught in an avalanche and frozen
alive. The conceit of the show is that, during their 90-year hiatus,
generations of performers pilfered their songbook and passed
them off as their own. Now, they have thawed out and are back
to reclaim their intellectual property. In this article, I argue that
Kitty and Dan’s quest to reclaim queer coded music under the
banner of a single queer authorship gives shape and form to the
tradition of queer coding, while also creating an affective history
and queer origin myth that exposes the queer temporal ethos of
nostalgic drag performance.