Methodologically grounded in ethnography, Dragging incorporates auto-theoretical material that lays bare the intimacies of research, teaching, and loving, as well as their painful failures. Drag is more than gender impersonation, and it is more than resistance to norms. It is productively messy and ambivalent, and in these and other ways can serve to attune us to political and aesthetic alternatives to the increasingly widespread desire to be led.
One of very few books about drag by an anthropologist, and using a uniquely personal approach, Dragging is an ethnography of artists and activists.
Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY. They are the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality and dozens of chapters and articles. Their work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Creative Capital|Andy Warhol Foundation, and Data & Society.