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The Draggedy Project – Drag and the Creation of Identity

Drag Origin Stories: Harry Hawk and Austin Grietz talk with gender performers about the origins of their drag personas.
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The Draggedy Project – Drag and the Creation of Identity
2016
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Jun 28, 2016

A conversation with Sal Virelli about the creation and development of Villinda Vile.

Sal is a horror drag performer from Michigan and is 19 years old and is a polished entertainer and a rising star in the drag community. He created Villinda and other drag personas, as well as creating clothing of his own design and acting in community theater.

 

Sal describes a dark past with which he used to build and embellish the characters Linda and Villinda. Born and raised in Michigan Sal has explored community theater, sewing and fashion.

Sal's drag persona Villinda Vile entertains at an annual Michigan haunted "house." Sal has taken his self proclaimed, "dark past" and used it as inspiration for scaring the paying public.
You can find Villinda Vile on Facebook and Sal Virelli on Instagram. Sal's Black Rainbow Custom Clothing & Costumes is also on Instagram. Listen to other conversations and view photographs about gender artists on Draggedy.com a project created by @hhawk and @rainbowsquirtle with stories releasing throughout the summer of 2016.
 

 

 

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Jun 26, 2016

 

Timothy French is a dancer, choreographer, and fashion merchandiser out of New York City whose drag persona is Stefani Victoria Spears.

Learn about Timothy and Stefani in Harry’s and Austin’s this installment of The Draggedy Project. Timothy discusses the origins of his performance persona in this conversation while also highlighting some of the struggles of being a gender performer as well as the possibilities that he sees within the world of drag and gender performance.
 

Drag Persona Origins

Like many other queens, Timothy’s drag experience began as a Halloween costume at the request of friends. Living in Chicago at the time, Timothy was friends with many drag and gender performers in the community, and often did choreography work for their shows. They convinced him to try doing drag one year for Halloween, and Timothy thus created a costume based after one of his many idols, Lady Gaga. Timothy discusses his opportunity to meet Gaga, as well as the influence of drag and gender artistry in her own work, during our conversation.
 
 
Transitions and Growth
Shortly after he started doing drag, Timothy moved from Chicago to New York City to pursue other professional goals. This starts a conversation about the differences between the art scenes within the two cities, and also leads to a discussion of some of the things that drag has been able to do for Timothy during this move. This reflects the wider discussion around the ultimate possibilities of drag and gender artistry—besides making a statement, Timothy feels that an integral part of gender artistry is self-improvement, and that his own drag work has helped him to become more comfortable in his own skin and allowed him to more fully and openly express himself.
 
 

Influences - External and Internal

The discussion then turns to specific events which have influenced the direction of Timothy’s gender artistry, most notably the New York City Mermaid Parade and the upcoming Heritage of Pride Parade. This discussion allows for Timothy to explain some of his influences in designing his costumes, which include some unusual material from Timothy’s professional life, such as store window designs which he studies as a part of his career in fashion merchandising. Timothy is currently employed by The Gap and credits their inclusive support for him and LGBTQ issues as an important turning point in his self acceptance. This leads to a discussion of the culmination of the different aspects of Timothy’s life in his drag career. Gender artistry is a multidimensional art form, which combines several different forms of art in creating a cohesive whole. Timothy is well aware of this fact, and his multitudinous artistic backgrounds have helped further his drag career.

Looking to the Future

Our discussion ends with a conversation about the future of drag and the possibilities which gender artistry holds. Timothy includes some comments about the recent popularity of shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, which act as a sort of double-edged sword for the drag and gender performance communities. On the one hand, shows such as Drag Race have popularized the world of gender performance and have introduced this incredible art form to thousands of people across the nation and the world. But on the other hand, this popularization has created a shift in the drag world, in which certain forms of gender performance are now seen as more legitimate in a mainstream view than others. This interesting contradiction is discussed by Timothy in light of his experience with auditioning for the show.
 

To keep up to date with everything that Timothy is working on, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at poshtwinkboi. Be sure to follow Harry and Austin on Twitter at @hhawk and @rainbowsquirtle, respectively. And be sure to follow Talking About Everything and The Draggedy Project on Stitcher Radio and iTunes! Keep checking back to draggedy.com for more episodes, pictures of gender performers, and links to more information about the artists we cover.

More images of Timothy & Stefani

 
 
Jun 20, 2016

Harry’s and Austin’s first conversation about the scope of The Draggedy Project.

They discuss the differences between how drag is most generally portrayed in mainstream media and the radical possibilities which drag presents. The conversation also focuses on some of the evolutions of drag as an art form, including its movement from small-scale performances at gay clubs to wider audiences in theatres and mainstream media, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race.

 

 

The Power of Drag

Harry and Austin start their discussion by talking about the possibilities of drag, especially in how drag is able to comment on several different social issues apart from just gender. Austin believes that drag is able to explore all kinds of themes, including what it means to have a national identity, what it means to grow older, and what it means to be human in general.

Word Choice

Harry and Austin then discuss some of the terminology used in the world of drag, debating the terminology of “drag” between “gender artistry” or “gender performance,” and the politics of using such terminology within circles of gender performers.

 

The movement from gay bars to more specific arenas for drag artistry is something that has certainly been happening for a while now, but the popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race and its subsequent Battle of the Seasons tours has certainly allowed drag to move out of the bar scene and into a scene that is generally more singular in its focus on drag.  However, Austin discusses how there has always been an underground scene which has completely embraced the more political and stand-alone aspects of drag and which has been existing for quite some time as relatively separate from the bar scene. Austin and Harry are also able to discuss how the world of theatre has influenced drag and has in some ways legitimized drag in the eyes of the mainstream media.
 

 

Learning about Drag

After discussing some of the current trends in the drag scene, Harry and Austin each discuss the first time they were fully aware of the art of gender performance. First drag or gender performance experiences are almost always memorable, and there is no difference for the first drag memories of Harry and Austin. Sharing these memories leads to a discussion on the history of drag, from far-away history to more modern media history.

Trends in Drag

The conversation then turns back to more modern trends in the world of gender performance, focusing on different types of gender portrayals—between ultra-glamorous looks to everyday, exceptionally mundane looks.  This turns to a discussion of the binary between the authentic and the inauthentic—can authenticity truly be achieved when using seemingly inauthentic means such as make-up, padding, and clothing choices?

The conversation closes with a discussion of what The Draggedy Project entails—a discussion with gender performers about what their intentions are in their gender performances, the origins of their performance personas, and how the culture of gender performance interacts with the culture in which we live today.

Thanks

Be sure to follow Harry and Austin on Twitter at @hhawk and @rainbowsquirtle, respectively. And be sure to follow Talking About Everything and The Draggedy Project on Stitcher Radio and iTunes! Keep checking back to www.draggedy.com for more episodes, pictures of gender performers, and links to more information about the artists we cover.

Austin writes: These performances come at a time influenced by video-sharing sites such as YouTube and the social graph in which performance itself has become elevated and idealized. This idealized form of performance also involves a high level of authenticity, which has become necessary for the popularization of any performer in today’s digital age. The gender performer has a unique role in this phenomenon, in that they both posses a high level of performance quality and are authentic in their self-expression, despite the assertion that gender performance is an attempt to “imitate.”

[Our] conversations shall focus not only on their performance choices and how such choices reflect public ideology surrounding gender, but also on how such choices reflect ideas surrounding other social constructions. These conversations will also attempt to investigate how the personal lives of gender performers, as well as the culture of our time, interact to create the final performance as presented to an audience.

 

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