Dragging Out (In)Difference: Explorations of the Cultural and Affective Politics of Drag Queens' Performances in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is both an ethnographic and autoethnographic meditation on theaffective, cultural, and national politics of drag performance amongst drag queens and other “feminine-expressing/presenting” drag performers in Toronto, Canada. Based on 24 months of fieldwork within various queer urban spaces and drag performance contexts as both an ethnographer and occasional drag performer, I contend that the politics of drag performance in Toronto escapes any singular designation as socio-politically transgressive, regressive, or reificatory. Drawing on the concept of “indifference to difference” popularized by queer of colour scholars Madhavi Menon (2015) and Naisargi Dave (2022; 2023), I maintain that despite drag’s characteristic emergence within a context of gendered differentiation, its most basic performative production might be a nascent politics of “indifference to difference” which within the markedly multicultural Canadian national context has the potential to trouble the nation’s adherence to a ubiquitous pro-nationalist identity politic fixated on defining and delimiting difference. This dissertation moves beyond previous scholarly examinations of drag performances’ ability to destabilize or obscure conventional distinctions between culturally dominant conceptions of masculinity/femininity, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and ii theatricality/reality, to, more importantly, investigate how drag’s politics of “indifference to difference” offers the equally viable possibility of disturbing the boundaries and borders between more nuanced and vital affective and ontologically-oriented oppositions (such as those between constructs of love/hate, desire/disgust, labour/play, and the ordinary/extraordinary) which underpin formations of gendered, sexual, ethnoracial, and national politics within Canada’s white settler colonial and multicultural milieu. Each chapter of this dissertation acts as an interrogation of a pervasive binary that continues to haunt academic deliberations on the politics and practice of “drag queening” or “feminine-expressing/presenting” drag performance, illustrating how drag’s production of a politics of “indifference to difference” permits performers and spectators alike to temporarily break away from the rigid distinctions that structure their sociocultural worlds, resulting in a space where the boundaries demarcating difference can be constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed in a manner that speaks to drag’s complicated, convoluted, and multiplicious political potentialities. Alongside this, this study acts as a novel intervention into contemporary conversations around the growing anti-drag sentiment within the Canadian (and broader North American) context.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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".