Facing Drag: Race, Gender Performance, and Masking in Contemporary Culture – Paperback

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by Evelyn Annuß (Editor), Raz Weiner (Editor)

Facing Drag brings together international experts from cultural studies – including history, media, theatre, dance, and performance studies – to explore how gender, race, and ethnicity are impersonated across time and cultures. Drawing on diverse case studies, the volume examines performative acts of crossing, appropriation, and re-signification, foregrounding their political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Expanding the concept of drag beyond gender bending, it investigates the interrelations of drag, processes of racialization and colonial histories. The essays offer critical insights into both the subversive potential of drag and its entanglement with violent forms of Othering and exclusion.

Author Biography

Evelyn Annuß is professor of gender studies and director of the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP) at mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. Her work engages the intersections of aesthetics, theories of performativity, and political critique. As a scholar of theater and literature, she focuses on political spectacle, and in particular on its historicity and mediality in contexts of National Socialism, colonial racisms, and (re)fascization.

Raz Weiner (Dr.) visiting lecturer at mdw – Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. His work focuses on traditions, archives and contemporary forms of colonialism, racialisation and queerness, the production of bodies and knowledge, and the co-constitution of human societies and digital worlds. — Number of Pages: 240 Dimensions: 0.51 x 9 x 6 IN Publication Date: March 24, 2026

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