"The Drag Queen Anthology"

Colleges so often spoil things. They take things you simply like and turn them into complicated confusions. They messed up Live Art performance with academic words and theories. That's why I tend to avoid their books and publications. Pages of text cluttered with references, brackets and footnotes. They tell you what they're going to tell you, then tell you then tell you what they've (apparently) told you but with keywords. And the language! Lord preserve us and our trans souls from "Re-embodied Identities", "Cultural crises", "normative aspirations" and "conformative agency" in our explorations of ourselves. Now I'm being chased in my E-Mails by offers of papers with those sort of titles because once I downloaded a document called "Towards A Theory Of Non-Transexuality". We make an exception for people like Judith Butler who opened up new ways of understanding what we do as trans, but even for Judith we have to draw the line at some terms and explainers. Strangely though, these kind of books - the ones which contain shorter articles on specialist trans topics written in straightforward language, can be really interesting and useful to us. For a start they aren't always offering a Grand Theory, more an account of something someone has been interested in enough to do some research. They're about finding out, not proving something. They mainly contain nice detailed descriptions and accounts of real characters, and they even contain stories and short useful histories. And while it may feel odd, as a trans, to be the subject of an "Ethnographic Study" as though we were in the Pacific being visited by Margaret Mead in the end it is quite interesting to see ourselves taken seriously and even, bless us, shown in a mirror of real reporting with no added media swerve. And so welcome to "The Drag Queen Anthology" subtitled, a bit painfully like a teacher telling a poor joke, "The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators". That last reference tells us that we are in the early 2000's when there was still a lot of flexibility in the way we could be referred to. It's a useful confusion, I find, not dogmatic and fixed. And in these pages we can be nicely informed about things like Drag in South African townships and the rise and fall of crossdressing in Canadian Military Entertainment in World War 2. There are many fascinating insights into aspects of trans in enough detail to learn about Difference. The subject is "Drag" in many of its forms and a really interesting paper about the historic split in Berlin between the radical Tunten and the interloper Drag Queens helps a lot to understand what has been happening to Drag in the West in recent years All in all then most of us will find this collection of essays and reports, and many like it, very illuminating. Sometimes colleges can get it right.