Queering ‘Queer’ Toronto Space: Transgressive QTBIPoC Drag Artists and Disrupting Homonormativity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the rise of mainstream drag cultures achieving international recognition through transnational circulations mediated by artistic platforms, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, discourses of drag authenticity have also emerged. Such representations are produced through homo/nationalist logics of sexual citizenship, normality, and ‘modernity’ to regulate and manage definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drag performance. The politics of drag thus come to cultivate insular grammars of legitimate drag performance practice through the proliferation of a queer politics built on homogeneity and sameness and furthermore, one that often seeks to bifurcate queerness and sexuality from race, class, and transness, among other vectors of systemic oppression that push mainstream queerness outside of its contained optic of white, middle-class, gay men. Access, success, and livability in such ‘queer’ spaces for marginalized artists is then predicated on a conformity to a homonormative performance politic. While contradictory to, what is supposed to be, the transgressive potential of queerness, queer artists who engage in feminist, revolutionary, insurgent, and radical politics often become rendered always-already elsewhere to the geographies of mainstream queerness for wtheir disruptive and threatening potential. In this article, I am in conversation with multiple Toronto QTBIPoC drag performers who are situated within these positions of peripheral subjecthood as they work through archives of resistance and decoloniality to trouble and unsettle homonormative exclusions and work to queer ‘queer space.’ These artists include Babia Majora, Sydney Quest, Rhinestone Chickadee, Halal Bae, Amian Black, and Mallika. These transformative strategies of queer re-making function through geneaologies of what I call the “insurgent drag subject” where radical queer of colour performance practice challenge the homonormative as a site of universal queer knowing and being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".