Drag Show

Boris Gay

He's here, he's queer, it's Scotland's premiere drag king: BORIS GAY! Modelled on the talents and showtunes of Doris Day, Boris Gay's part-performance/part-lecture will help you to explore gender and sexuality through song, dance, and drag. The evening's entertainment will begin with a piece entitled 'becoming Boris', where the categories of the gendered body will be called into question through the conventions of cabaret and strip tease.  Once Boris is suitably dragged up, he will present a lecture on what constitutes the 'masculine' body, contextualizing this within Britain’s burgeoning drag king scene. Culturally specific examples locate drag practises from the UK within wider trans-historical Anglo-European constructions of gender. Boris explores how masculinity can be expressed in public/performance contexts.  Using the theoretical queer frameworks of Judith Butler and Diane Torr, Boris will ask if performative gender can be questioned or radicalized through performance and explore what contributes to our public and external understanding of gender and sexuality.  This lecture asks ‘what visual codes signify a body as a male or queer body?  Are these codes contingent across time? Can masculinity be radicalized and queered by history?’ And finally, ‘Can drag kings be queer?’ Rounding off with a song and dance, Boris hopes to entertain, scandalize, provoke, and delight while showing how drag kings can influence and infiltrate drag culture in years to come. Strictly for an adult audience!