The rise and fall of the progressive drag queen: Westernization of cross-dressing in 1990s Poland

Abstract

The article studies the meanings of drag in the Polish media in the period 1989–2002. A textual analysis of mainstream as well as gay and lesbian media texts on drag queens was conducted to examine strategies that explained and legitimated drag in the context of the westernization of Polish culture, the socioeconomic changes of the 1990s, and the politics of respectability of the early Polish gay rights movement. The article shows that drag lacked the western political meanings that focused on gender performativity and gay rights; instead, it assumed connotations specific to the time and place. Drag queens turned out to embody the socioeconomic changes and widely shared class and geopolitical aspirations related to the 1990s westernization of Poland, but they also attested to the persisting distance between Poland and the imagined West. The article calls for critical attention when applying western theoretical concepts to the East.

Becoming apart: Drag and the practice of immanent resistance in postsocialist Belgrade

“…The Serbian sociopolitical experience has been markedly different given the historical experience of self-governing socialism followed by wars, isolation, re-traditionalization and a two-decades-long socioeconomic transition toward liberal democracy and a neoliberal market economy. Historical experiences shaping the formation of drag in Serbia are also different from those in the rest of the former Eastern Bloc (see Janion, 2020).…”

Pornification as Westernization on the semi-periphery: The history of the Hungarian ‘porn boom’ in the 1990s

“…for achieving these targets and aims (Thornton et al, 2015). The notion that public discourses around sexuality at the time and shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain served to westernize local culture and legitimize some of the socioeconomic changes in the Eastern European region (Janion, 2020), including the intensification of the practice of commodifying female bodies (Ibroscheva, 2013), is rather under-discussed in the literature. This article aims to close this knowledge gap by focussing on a significant period of the Hungarian porn industry’s history, the second half of the 1980s and the long 1990s.…”

“…We argue that the presence and the proliferation of pornography in public discourses, especially those of the local representatives of the porn industry and some liberal intellectuals, were understood and legitimized as a natural element of the process of westernization and as a sign of the emergence of liberal democracy. Therefore, by following in the footsteps of previous analysis being critical about applying Western-based concepts to studying the topic of sexuality in ‘the East’ of Europe (Navickaité, 2013; Janion, 2020), this analysis aims to refine the concept of pornification as a western-based term. Also, we argue that the concept of pornification is rather limited and requires critical rethinking and contextualization to grasp the ‘porn boom’ in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain.…”

Drag for everyone: Creative industries and the becoming-visible of drag in the 21st century Belgrade

“…Janion (2020) argues in her study of cross-dressing in 1990s Poland, that “drag is an Anglo-American phenomenon which spread around the world with globalization, the expansion of American consumerism, and the internalization of gay identities,” which means that when translated and adapted to the non-American and non-Western context, drag is “an unstable, contextual category, whose flickering meanings are highly gendered, racialized, and classed” (3). While Janion recognizes that drag blends with “local ideologies and institutions of gender/sexuality,” and that it assumes “various hybrid forms,” she employs the definition of a drag queen as “a homosexual man who performs femininity onstage to an audience that is aware that he is male” (3).…”