Law’s a Drag: A Queer Collaborative Research Network

East Tower 

Being predominantly queer, marginalised, and self-employed persons, drag artists find themselves subject to overlapping forms of political and socio-economic disadvantage as subjects of law. As workers, drag artists are largely not unionised, are financially precarious, and are embedded within intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, and other vulnerabilities that can render them prone to forms of structural injustice. There is however a lack of research into how drag artists experience law through their working and personal lives. In the 'Law's a Drag' network, we want to examine the lived experience of law for drag artists in the UK and beyond. The network is composed of academics and drag artists (including drag queens, drag kings, and nonbinary drag artists). Through creative ideation activities that aim to subvert the traditional academic conference, we have identified legal challenges faced by artists which should be subject to future research, including policing, contract law, insurance, gender discrimination, access to justice, and many other topics besides. Across these topics, we identify core themes of social justice, such as community, precarity, and inclusion, all of which suggest potential avenues for collaborative research projects. We consider potential transformative methodologies for doing so, including "journey mapping" artists' working lives, queering or disrupting the traditional academic conference, forum theatre, and creative co-authorship of research methods. By including drag artists as stakeholders in the ethical design of research, we can discover innovative methodologies, design research with high impact potential, and empower drag artists nationally and internationally. This paper will outline our network development thus far, explain our key methodological approaches, and invite others to join us in our quest for radical queer liberation!