Show Generosity to These Monstrosities Investigating the Gothic

‘Show Generosity to These Monstrosities’: Investigating the Gothic Dimensions of Drag in the Performance of Sharon Needles and Acid Betty Tom Brassington

• ‘We mock identity. ’ - E. Alex Jung, ‘Ru. Paul on How Straight People Steal From Gay Culture and Why Educating Youth Is a Waste of Time’ [interview] http: //www. vulture. com/2016/03/rupaul-drag-raceinterview. html [accessed 16 th, May 2016] • Broadly, drag can be summarised as a performance style that plays with concepts of gender identity, politics, and character tropes. • Drag is a highly nebulous performance style, which works within and plays with pop culture.

Gothic and Drag Intersections • Corporeal Malleability ‘Bodies which do not conform […] which flout conventions of their culture and go without appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes. ’ - Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) p. 7 ‘the grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon. ’ - Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘“The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources”, from M. M. Bakhtin (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) p. 93 • Artifice to the extreme ‘the essence of Camp is its love of the Unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. ’ - Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ <http: //tinyurl. com/k 2 dws 47> [accessed 11 th, May 2016] • Textual Similarities ‘Gothic is cross-dressing, drag, a performance of textuality’ - Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995) p. 60

Sharon Needles • https: //youtu. be/49 X 1 L 2 k. Phm. U? t=1350 • ‘to sum up one of my shows is to say they are an example of social and current media anxieties. Or to sum it up the way I would say, “an example to break something with a baseball bat. ’ - Sharon Needles, ‘Meet the Queens’, Ru. Paul’s Drag Race Season 4 [Promotional Material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009 -) • ‘I pull a lot of my drag inspirations from The Nightly News, NPR, PBS, and 5 year olds. ’ - Needles, ‘Meet the Queens’

• ‘Both the gay icon and the monster are associated with bodies that are overdetermined spectacle. ’ - Karen E. Macfarlane, ‘The Monstrous House of Gaga’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (New York & London: Routledge, 2012) p. 115 • ‘it [the body] is also subject to the shape of perception as presented within a socio-historico-cultural context. ’ - Nicholas Hope, ‘The Learnt Body: The Body as a Reflection of Socio-Cultural Responses to Landscape’, in Ways of Seeing a Body: Body and Performance, ed. Sandra Reeve (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2013) p. 140 • ‘I’m perverse/I’m preserved/I am forever baby/I am your taxidermy’ - Sharon Needles, ‘Taxidermy’, Taxidermy [M 4 A] (Los Angeles, CA: Sidecar Records, 2015)

Acid Betty • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=3 Vyl_n. Ate. Ws • ‘My drag style is very aggressive, very alternative, hyper colour, and glow in the dark. ’ - Acid Betty, ‘Meet the Queens’, Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 8 [promotional material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009 -) • ‘Do I even impersonate a woman, I wanna pose that question’ - WOWPresents, ‘Season 8 Ru. Paul’s Drag Race Queens Impersonate Each Other with Kim Chi! Naomi Smalls! BOB! Chi!’ [promotional material], You. Tube <https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=S_vp. Nr_TOqg> <0: 00: 150: 00: 18> [accessed 16 th, May 2016]

• ‘Gothic posits skin primarily as a boundary to be disrupted. ’ - Catherine Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) p. 10 • ‘It is our bodies which allow us to act, to intervene in and to alter the daily flow of life. ’ - Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 1993; repr. 1994) p. 9 • ‘dress, the body and the self – are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality. ’ - Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, p. 10

Conclusions – Celebratory Gothic • ‘They’ll go out and they’ll steal something, and then get dressed up and come to a ball for that one night and live the fantasy. ’ - Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston (Miramax, 1991) <0: 06: 25 -0: 06: 29> • ‘You go in there and you feel… you feel a hundred percent right as being gay. ’ - Paris is Burning, <0: 04: 10 -0: 04: 17> • ‘The drag artist is classical, a failed classicism, just as one of the clichés of Gothicism is the classical temple in ruins. ’ - David Bergman, ‘Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric’, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) p. 102 • ‘even gothic failure is a kind of success if it challenges the status quo and insists on behaviors otherwise invisible. ’ - George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006) p. 202

Bibliography • Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘“The Grotesque Image of the Body and its Sources”, from M. M. Bakhtin (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) • Betty, Acid, ‘Meet the Queens’, Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 8 [promotional material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009 -) • Bergman, David ‘Strategic Camp: The Art of Gay Rhetoric’, in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) p. 102 • Entwistle, Joanne The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) • Haggerty, George E. , Queer Gothic (Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006) • Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995) • Hope, Nicholas, ‘The Learnt Body: The Body as a Reflection of Socio-Cultural Responses to Landscape’, in Ways of Seeing a Body: Body and Performance, ed. Sandra Reeve (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2013) • Instagram, ‘acidbetty’, http: //www. Instagram. com/acidbetty • Instagram, ‘jamesstjames 1’, http: //www. Instagram. com/jamesstjames 1

• Instagram, ‘sharonneedlespgh’, http: //www. Instagram. com/sharonneedlespgh • Jung, E. Alex, ‘Ru. Paul on How Straight People Steal From Gay Culture and Why Educating the Youth Is a Waste of Time’ [Interview] <http: //www. vulture. com/2016/03/rupaul-drag-race-interview. html> [accessed 16 th, May 2016] • Macfarlane, Karen E. , ‘The Monstrous House of Gaga’, in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (New York & London: Routledge, 2012) • Needles, Sharon, ‘Meet the Queens’, Ru. Paul’s Drag Race Season 4 [Promotional Material] (World of Wonder Productions, 2009 -) • Needles, Sharon, Taxidermy [M 4 A] (Los Angeles, CA: Sidecar Records, 2015) • Paris is Burning, dir. Jennie Livingston (Miramax, 1991) • Shilling, Chris, The Body and Social Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 1993; repr. 1994) • Spooner, Catherine, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) • Sontag, Susan, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ <http: //tinyurl. com/k 2 dws 47> [accessed 11 th, May 2016] • WOWPresents, ‘Season 8 Ru. Paul’s Drag Race Queens Impersonate Each Other with Kim Chi! Naomi Smalls! BOB! Chi! [promotional material] <https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=S_vp. Nr_TOqg> [accessed 16 th, May 2016]