Dragademia: #BoyfriendJoe Chats with LaWhore Vagistan

Photo credit: LaWhore Vagistan by Caroline Alden at Tufts University

Part book launch, part drag show, part academic conversation, part public gossip session, this event brings together LaWhore Vagistan and Joe Parslow to unpick contemporary drag performance and its relationships to gender, politics and resistance. Drawing from the publication of Dr. Vagistan’s Decolonize Drag (2023) and its focus ‘on a variety of gender performers that resist and laugh at colonial projects through their aesthetic practices’, we will use our experience as researchers, teachers, performers and producers of drag performance to think about drag presents and futures. From anecdote to essay, backstage gossip to analysis, this event brings together academic and fabulous registers to explore drag practices and politics often obscured by the bright lights of the mainstream.

Drawing from the format of the internationally ignored show #BoyfriendJoe Chats, a series of live interviews with queer performers at Her Upstairs (2016-18), this event brings the gay bar to the university to see what knowledges, practices and ideas can emerge at the peripheries of academic and popular conversations about drag and its colonial and decolonial potential.

Dr LaWhore Vagistan is everyone’s favorite overdressed, overeducated, overopinionated South Asian drag aunty. She is the host of the annual South Asian drag festival DRAGISTAN and founder of Chicago’s queer Bollywood night Jai Ho! Her music videos have screened at the Mississauga South Asian Film Festival, Austin OUTsider multi-arts festival, Hyderabad Queer Film Festival, and San Francisco 3rd i film festival. She has performed at the Wilbur Theatre and La Mama with Sasha Velour, as well as at the Austin International Drag Festival, Asia Society, AS220, Queens Musuem, Jack Theater, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Not Festival, Links Hall, and A.R.T. Oberon. You can find her on YouTube delivering a TEDx Talk titled “How to be an Aunty” and on Instagram at @lawhorevagistan.

Dr Joe Parslow is a Lecturer in Popular and Queer Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, working across queer performance, ethics and integrity and practice research. They also work as a producer of queer nightlife performance. Their research focusses on queer performance and studies, examining how queer communities come together in spaces where drag and queer performances happens. Their first monograph, Their Majesties: Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London (Routledge, 2024), examines London’s drag scene since 2009. Their current research explores drag performance and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and an ongoing project exploring contemporary queer hope.