Drag Vistas and Visions: Doing it out in the open – drag studies as a field.

This chapter sets out the underpinning need for drag studies as a field of research. It starts with some of the key ideas in field theory – such an approach studies internal and external energies and influences on individuals in relation to a larger structure. Adapting this to drag as a field produces a vision of several common approaches to its study that are drawn out in the chapter. We do this by looking to a specific well-known drag performer (to be determined in relation to the submissions we have in the volume) and sketch out the various approaches that have been/can be used to read the performer’s work. The chapter makes the argument that in the field of drag studies there are many approaches grounded in specific intellectual traditions (historical, economic, performance theory, gender theory, design/fashion, popular performance etc) but what coheres them is an attention to a resistance to normativity, and the geographic and historical contexts in which the work exists. As such, the chapter makes the case for an overarching cohering approach in these traditions that binds the numerous methods of study and thereby generates a field of drag studies – but one that is mobile, resistive and, productively, does not quite trust itself.

Drag methods, drag frameworks.