Jana Evans Braziel

Kathleen LeBesco

Fatness and Transgression

Bodies Out of Bounds

Jean Bobby Noble

Donna Jean Troka

Scholars and practitioners explore the phenomenon of female-to-male performers in 20 essays discussing drag king scenes, desire and the audience, and theory. They also include first-person narratives, and a photo gallery. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Drag King Anthology

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

Dispelling the myth that drag kings are simply 'women doing drag', The Drag King Anthology presents enlightening essays that address gender, sexuality and feminism. Using prose, poetry and photographs, an eclectic mix of scholars, performers and fans offer cultural and political insights on the international growth and development of drag king troupes and communities.

This work examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. It is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness.

Kathleen LeBesco

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