We are currently looking for contributions to The Routledge Companion to Drag, a volume that will provide an accessible reference work to drag. This is an area which has garnered much attention through the popularity of TV series such as RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose. The Routledge Companion to Drag is a long over-due response to the popularity of drag cultures, providing detailed critical insights to the world of drag that goes beyond the narrow version of the glitz and glamour on TV screens. The volume will signal a major new direction for a form that has become cultural currency in the media and, more recently, of growing importance for the academy.
The Routledge Companion to Drag will be a comprehensive reference work on the multi-limbed topic of drag. The volume connects contemporary concerns around identity and intersectionality to the field of drag studies, including essays on race and ethnicity, disability, class – areas that reflect the current cultural backdrop and social activism of today’s potential readers. The international and interdisciplinary focus will lay out the field in such a way that it includes both mainstream, non-mainstream, established and emergent practices and cultures.
The editors of The Routledge Companion to Drag, Mark Edward, Stephen Farrier, and Garjan Sterk, aim to create and widely disseminate a collection of trans/interdisciplinary scholarly papers on drag across a wide range of subject areas.
We therefore call upon drag academics, drag practitioner-researchers, drag activists, drag performers, drag fans, and cultural theorists, gender studies scholars, critical race scholars, historians etc. working on/researching drag to contribute to this collection.
We are currently seeking expressions of interest in areas such as:
- drag histories,
- street and activist drag agendas,
- underexplored ball culture and drag,
- drag cultures in popular culture,
- the contemporary and historical diversity of drag, drag kings/queens to sissies, AFAB queens/kings, post/alt-drag, trad drag and non-binary and trans drag, drag that exceeds our current understanding of drag,
- popular drag cultures and class,
- drag and disability and ableism,
- drag and gender: awkward bedfellows?
- drag and race,
- drag and colonialism – the colonial in drag practice,
- drag and fashion.
If your preference and expertise is to write on another topic, please feel free to send us an email about your idea.
We seek authors who can write on drag practices beyond the global North, to include work from Oceania, Asia, Africa and Latin America. We are looking for contributions that explore, critique and celebrate drag in its local contexts and historical specificity.
The Routledge Companion to Drag will be around 54 contributions. Each of them will be around 6,000 words in length and form a coherent, carefully focused entity. The various chapters will be clustered in cohesive parts, each preceded with an introduction to that specific field.
Planning
If you are interested, could you please confirm your intention to contribute to The Routledge Companion to Drag before 30 January 2023?
We would expect an abstract (300 words max) and a bio (200 words max) by 30 March 2023.
Your abstract should provide the following information:
- your name, postal address, email address, and contact telephone number
- your institutional affiliation (if applicable) and ORCID-number (if you have one)
Please e-mail your abstract and bio in a Word file titled: [last name].CompanionToDrag
Send the file and possible questions to: garjansterk@gmail.com
We will inform you about acceptance by the end of May 2023
We expect the full chapters around 1 December 2023
>> Please notify us if you have trouble meeting these dates. There is some leeway.
The Routledge Companion to Drag is expected to be launched in hard back, digital form and eventually paperback in the Spring of 2024.