EDITED COLLECTIONS
Crookston, Cameron ed. 2021. The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging? Intellect.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo68884012.html
The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a collection of original material that goes beyond simple analysis of the show and examines the profound effect that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had on the cultures that surround it: audience cultures, economics, branding, queer politics and all points in between. Once a cult show marketed primarily to gay men, Drag Race has drawn both praise and criticism for its ability to market itself to broader, straighter and increasingly younger fans. The show’s depiction of drag as both a celebrated form of entertainment and as a potentially lucrative career path has created an explosion of aspiring queens in unprecedented numbers, and had a far-reaching impact on drag as both an art form and a career. Contributors include scholars based in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and South Africa from theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology and marketing.
Crookston, Cameron and Peter Kuling eds. 2020. “Drag Performance in Canada.” Canadian Theatre Review. 185.
https://ctr.utpjournals.press/toc/ctr/185
To say that drag is having a significant moment in popular culture would be putting it mildly. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, drag artists appear everywhere on social media, mainstream television, Oscar-nominated films, international tours, and theatrical stages around the world. Academics have responded to this outpouring of content and interest by publishing work on drag with increased fervour and passion for the historic queer art form. From Craig Russell's 1977 cult film Outrageous to plays like John Herbert's Fortune in Men's Eyes (1967), Michel Tremblay's Hosanna (1973), and Sky Gilbert's Drag Queens on Trial (1985), Canadian performers and artists brought drag to international attention long before Divine or RuPaul became household names. However, within contemporary drag scholarship, Canada remains under-represented. This issue of Canadian Theatre Review seeks to address this gap in the field of drag studies by offering a robust contribution of original writing that highlights the work and voices of drag artists from across Canada.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Crookston, Cameron. 2022.“What’s Live Got To Do With It? Digital Drag in the Time of COVID-19.” TDR: The Drama Review. 66.2.
In the first month of Covid-19 restrictions, live performers from opera singers to Broadway actors quickly took to social media platforms to find alternate ways of engaging their audiences. Drag artists, I argue, are in a unique position in relation to other live performers in this moment of digital performance. The historic relationship between queer performance and recorded media, the history of LGBTQ2+ community-building through social media, as well as the citational nature of queer coding fuels drag as an art form. For most live performers, Covid-19 represents an interruption and suspension of their traditional artistic practice, but for queer artists and audiences, the recent influx of digital performance during quarantine creates a uniquely reflexive moment in the history of drag.
Crookston, Cameron. 2021. “Can I Be Frank with You? Laverne Cox and the Historiographic Dramaturgy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 27. 2.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/27/2/233/170139/Can-I-Be-Frank-with-You-Laverne-Cox-and-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext
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. Originally workshopped as a stage play in the early 1970s, Rocky Horror is constructed as a self-conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular 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 Laverne Cox’s performance in Danny Ortega’s 2016 television remake. In this article, I will examine how Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.
Cameron Crookston. 2021. “It Feels Like Yesterday: Drag, Nostalgia, and Queer Affective History in The Vaudevillians.” Journal of Homosexuality. 69.5.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2021.1892403
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.
Crookston, Cameron. 2018. “Off the Clock: Is Drag ‘Just a Job’?” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. 3.1.
https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/qsmpc.3.1.101_1
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.
To request barrier free access to academic articles for teaching or research please email: cameron.crookston@ubc.ca
BOOK CHAPTERS
Cameron Crookston. “Outrageous Trash: Divine, Craig Russell and Drag Films of the 1970s” in The Routledge Companion to Drag. Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier. (Forthcoming, 2024).
Drag had been a highly visible and often stigmatized symbol of queerness in years between WWI and Stonewall, and went through a period of cultural transition in the 1970s as queer culture more generally negotiated its visibility and relationship to mainstream culture in the age of gay liberation. Pink Flamingos and Outrageous! place drag icons at the centre of their narratives and in doing so reflect attitudes towards drag in this critical period in queer history with respect to drag’s status as a radical artform, and, paradoxically, its appeal to heterosexual viewers. Both films stand on the shoulders of experimental filmmakers from the 1950s and 1960s while also serving as an inspiration for future generations of drag artists and filmmakers alike. The films were also responsible for launching the careers of their stars who would go on to become two of the first openly gay drag celebrities in a mainstream context. In analyzing all of this in the historical context of the 1970s, this chapter will also consider how the films, as well as critical responses to them, anticipated future incarnations of drag in mainstream media such as Hollywood drag films in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Crookston, Cameron. 2018.“Passing the Torch Song: Mothers, Daughters and Chosen Families in the Canadian Drag Community” in Q2Q: Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada. Edited by Peter Dickenson, C.E. Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh. Playwrights Canada Press. 54-65.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/Q/Q2Q-Queer-Canadian-Theatre-and-Performance
Early gay liberationists in the US and Canada intentionally modeled the emergent “gay community” of the 1970s and early 1980s after an ethnic community. 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. 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 examines how drag families and drag mothers function as both a chosen family and method for passing down an artistic practice in the face of generations of erasure
INTERVIEWS AND MEDIA CONSULTING
Marcus Medford. 2023. “Why Is Drag Story Time At The Centre Of A Political Firestorm Right Now?” ByBlacks.com
Virginie Nussbaum. 2023. “«Drag Race»: derrière les paillettes, le phénomène.”
Les Temps.
https://www.letemps.ch/culture/drag-race-derriere-les-paillettes-le-phenomene
Keegan Kozolanka and Taylor Pace. 2023. “THE BIG READ: ‘Drag Queen Storytime’ has sparked a new chapter of hate in Ontario.” Guelphtoday.com.
“The History of 12 Alexander Street.” 2022. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
https://buddiesinbadtimes.com/about/history/the-history-of-12-alexander-street/
David Oliver. 2022. “Call Me By Your Name’: Is It Still An Important Cultural Touchstone Five Years Later?”
USA Today.
Rebekah Buchanan. 2021. “The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The New Books in Popular Culture Podcast. The New Books Network.
https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-cultural-impact-of-rupauls-drag-race