Episode 5: Drag

For many years now, big names from the drag scene such as Olivia Jones have been an integral part of major pop culture events in prime time - and since "Ru Paul's Drag Race" and Heidi Klum's "Queen of Drag" at the latest, drag queens seem to have arrived in the mainstream. But alongside these highly represented, hyper-feminine drag queens, there is also the large, still less visible "drag king" scene: women who play with attributes perceived as masculine.

In our fifth and, for the time being, last issue of Butler, Butch, Beyoncé, we asked how drag relates to the concepts of femininity and masculinity: What critical potential is there in drag, what role does it play for the feminist perspective? Can feminism benefit from it or should it distance itself from the performed "hyper-femininity" and "hyper-masculinity"?

Together with Magdalena Rodekirchen, gender scientist at the University of Manchester, and drag artists Simon Rudat (feat Ja Lo) and Frederik Tidén, we looked at the phenomenon of drag in an artistic and discursive way - and examined its socio-political impact and its links to feminism.