Drag publique: the queer spectacle, the emaciated spectator and the public secret

This chapter how illustrates how drag-based performances can highlight the issues surrounding the policing of the public performance of gender identity. Drawing on Read’s (2013) concept of the emaciated spectator, I suggest that introducing the pathogenic quality of queerness into public streets interrogates the limits to which inner identity can be expressed and whether or not the public audiences that receive the performance can contain it. Simultaneously, drag and gender performance also has a quality of affective contagion (from Hickey-Moody, 2016) that, if not contained, has the ability to become infectious. therefore, the pathogen starts to occupy a queer space of being public and private, spoken and unspoken simultaneously. I conclude by stating that such performances of queerness intrinsically interrogate what is said and unsaid by the spaces the queer individual can inhabit through this visual mode of performance, consequently expressing a longing from the artist for a future that is yet to pass.