Serious Play: Drag, Transgender, and the Relationship between Performance and Identity in the Life Writing of RuPaul and Kate Bornstein

RuPaul’s and Bornstein’s life writing is influenced not only by their identifications with gay or transsexual traditions, but also their “disidentifications” with the assimilationist queer politics gaining force in the 1990s. Each negotiates identities on the boundaries of multiple categories while struggling to engage mainstream readers as active participants in creating textual meaning and challenging repressive politics.