Research Session 3

For the third research session, I read about individual accounts with drag. This interest was sparked by my previous research. I used the same two websites as before because I had been finding useful information from them. http://sex.sagepub.com/content/13/3/275.full.pdf+html This website is the Sage Journals article where the three women did studies on the two different drag groups. While reading it, I took an interest in one individual who calls herself Sushi. His mother states that "he would leave for school dressed in normal clothes and change into an outfit made up of his father's pajamas and her mother's kimono" (281). This was his beginning with discovering who he wanted to be. Sushi came to drag because  he wanted to be a woman, but switches between male and female pronouns. He calls himself a "flaming queen." Sushi sometimes identifies as transgender, but always as a drag queen. Sushi has considered being transgender because he's attracted to men, but describes himself as being "some place in between a woman or a man" (281). I was not able to find any additional information about Sushi in this article, but I was pleased with what I did find. I had wanted individual accounts of being a drag queen, and I was able to get that.

I had more success in researching an individual drag king using the other website, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00831.x/full. This article, written by Maite Escudero-Alias is about MilDred Gerestant. I did search her name on Google to make sure that she does indeed exist. She is one of the first black drag kings. This article focused on what she does in her shows, which interested me. This has prompted my next research session to be about drag queen and king performances. MilDred performs different black stereotypes to show the audience how bad or hurtful stereotyping can be. She has traveled around the world with her show titled D.R.E.D. which stands for Daring Reality Every Day, and is also based off of her name. She switches genders in her performances and changes characters, giving them personalities. For example, her character Shaft is a violent man who pursues black women and does not have the best morals. These characters are often inspired by songs. MilDred strongly believes in having both a masculine and feminine side. She states that her shows "make people think more about race, gender, and sexuality" (Escudero-Alias). The article also states that other drag kings notice how hard she works. She defends individual's rights and their freedom to express themselves.

This session was more difficult than the previous two because I had to really focus on the individuals and trying to find as much information about them as I could. By this point in my research, I have begun understanding more about drag. At the beginning, I hardly knew anything about drag. I've been learning about the background of drag and how one comes into it. I've realized that each person has a different reason for coming to drag, and they all have different ways of showing who they are. To finish this post, I'd like to end with a quote from MilDred found in the Escudero-Alias article.

"Remember to always love yourself and find your true path. Life is too short to be afraid." (MilDred Gerestant).