Theorizations of the drag king phenomenon and definitions of "the Drag King" thus far have relied almost exclusively on Judith Halberstam's description of the drag king scenes in New York, London, and San Francisco. In order to expand the scope of the investigation of drag king culture and as an example of the range of drag kings and drag king acts that have developed across the U.S. and across the world, this article focuses on H.I.S. Kings, a group of women, who have been performing in Columbus, Ohio since 1996. By infusing drag with a dose of theory, which is always tempered by their outrageous sense of humor, H.I.S. Kings have developed what arguably is one of the most interesting varieties of kinging, an approach to the genre of the drag show that Halberstam's model cannot account for. Unlike kings in New York, for example, H.I.S. Kings frequently utilize the supposedly gay male form of camp in their performance of multiple masculinities and femininities, and they create innovative ensemble numbers that engage the racial and gender politics of drag. The example of H.I.S. Kings calls into question any theorization of the drag king phenomenon that ignores cultural developments in the heartland by focusing exclusively on cities traditionally considered the centers of queer culture.
German director Sabine Bernardi’s Romeos presents a progressive and more complete view of transgender experience than a previous generation of films on the subject. Skilfully avoiding outdated tropes in her representation of the female-to-male (FTM) trans man Lukas’s transition, the film instead places it in a cultural and sociopolitical context that shows him confronting ‘cultural cisgenderism’ and negotiating the medicalization of his ‘condition’ to obtain the mastectomy he wants. Romeos, however, does not posit surgical intervention as the central element in its protagonist’s transition but shows how gender identity and expression are conceived internally, independently of the individual’s embodiment. Thus, this article argues that the developing maleness and masculinity that Lukas exhibits demonstrates that there exists a significant difference between the penis and the phallus. Lukas is able to ‘fashion the phallus’ – what social psychologists have called a ‘cultural genital’ – with a combination of appearance (including his fashionable male attire), hormone therapy and a strict workout regime. Even though a male genital may not be present in a physical sense, the significance attributed to his cultural genital allows Lukas to express his psychic gender identity and to establish the trans man, in the words of one gender theorist, as ‘attractive, appealing, and gendered while simultaneously presenting a gender at odds with sex, a sense of self not derived from the body’. Still the discrepancy between his gender identity and his embodiment at times causes considerable problems for Lukas, especially when his love interest, the cisgender Fabio, accidentally finds out that Lukas is trans and questions his physical genital. That Lukas nonetheless manages to establish himself as a desiring subject capable of establishing a romantic relationship with Fabio and consummating it by having sex with him bespeaks the power of self-definition and the significant role that the cultural genital plays in this process.
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