Asian Drag

Drag summation of the work, Cheuse said that “this little work of fiction, with its wild metaphors and surprising turns, seems as tipsy as a dancer with too many drinks. It celebrates the Dionysian element in Arab culture we’ve seen much too little of these recent decades.” A Thousand and One Nights; Transgender Identity in Iranian Cinema; Transgender Muslims; Transgendered Subjectivities in Contemporary Iran SEE ALSO BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu ʿArab, Muhammad. “Thani al-Suwaidi: Tamarrud al-shaʿir wa-al-riwaʾi” [Thani al-Suwaidi: Rebellion of the poet and novelist]. Mulhaq al-Khalij al-Thaqafi, 1 July 2013. http:// www.alkhaleej.ae/supplements/page/c4437224-6670-43c4-a328 -4a66c4bff8f0 Barakat, Hoda. The Stone of Laughter. Translated by Sophie Bennett. New York: Interlink Books, 1995. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Nur al-Din, Majid. “Thani Abdullah al-Suwaidi … Author of the Shock Novel.” Al-Ittihad al-Thaqafi, 10 March 2011. http:// www.alittihad.ae/details.php?id=23023&y=2011 Orthofer, M. A. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. Complete Review, 15 November 2012. http://www.complete -review.com/reviews/arab/suwaidit.htm Paine, Patty, Jeff Lodge, and Samia Touati, eds. Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011. Samman, Hanadi al-. “Out of the Closet: Representations of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Contemporary Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature 39, no. 2 (2008): 270–310. Samman, Hanadi al-. Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Cheuse, Alan. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. National Public Radio, 23 July 2012. http://www.npr.org /2012/07/23/157248915/review-the-diesel Sarayrah, Lili. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. Three Percent (blog), University of Rochester. Accessed 20 November 2017. http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threeper cent/index.php?id=6342 Costa, LeeRay M., and Andrew J. Matzner. Male Bodies, Women’s Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand’s Transgendered Youth. New York: Haworth Press, 2007. Suwaidi, Thani, al-. Liyajiff riq al-bahr [So the sea’s foam may dry out]. United Arab Emirates: Ittihād Kuttab wa-Udabāʾ alImarat, 1991. Habib, Samar, ed. Islam and Homosexuality. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Suwaidi, Thani al-. Al-Ashyaʾ tamurr [Stuff happens]. Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 2000. Hakim, Tawfiq al-. Return of the Spirit. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012. Suwaidi, Thani al-. “Al-Suwaidi, Creator of the Shock Novel from the Emirates” (interview). Al-Jazeera, 4 May 2004. Hutchins, William Maynard. Introduction to The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi, 9–22. Austin, TX: Antibookclub, 2012. Suwaidi, Thani al-. Email dated 25 October 2011a. Khalifa, Fatima Ahmad. Nashʿat al-riwaya wa tawatturatuha fi dawlat al-Imarat al-ʿArabiya al-Muttahida [The birth and development of the novel in the United Arab Emirates]. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Manshurat al-Majmaʿ alThaqafi, 2003. Suwaidi, Thani al-. Email dated 3 January 2012a. Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. Oxford: Oneworld, 2010. Suwaidi, Thani al-. “Riwiyat ‘Dizil’.” Unpublished statement. Email dated 25 October 2011b. Suwaidi, Thani al-. The Diesel. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins. Austin, TX: Antibookclub, 2012b. Originally published as Al-Dizil (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 1994). Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Lyons, Malcolm, and Ursula Lyons, trans. The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Vol. 1, Nights 1 to 294. London: Penguin, 2008. Drag SEE Cross-Dressing in the West; Transvestites/Transsexuals. Mahfouz, Naguib. Sugar Street. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 1992. Mahfouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley. Translated by Humphrey Davies. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2011. Munif, Abdelrahman. Cities of Salt: A Novel. Translated by Peter Theroux. New York: Random House, 1987. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 478 Drag, Asian KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI Assistant Professor, Department of Drama and Dance and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Tufts University, Medford, MA GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY Drag, Asian ASIFA LAHORE n Asifa Lahore, who calls herself the United Kingdom’s first out Muslim Pakistani drag queen, is a performer, internet celebrity, and activist. Her involvement in the queer British Asian community includes working at the sexual health and advocacy organization NAZ; hosting queer Asian parties such as Urban Desi, Club Kali, and Disco Rani; creating a series of music videos released on YouTube; and appearing on various talk shows to speak about her experiences as a gay Muslim. She famously stages her Muslim and Pakistani identities by performing in a full burka, stripping into a sari, and subsequently revealing a miniskirt. In a Facebook video testimonial uploaded in May 2017, Lahore came out to her online following as a transgender woman. Navigating the respectability politics of the Pakistani diaspora, the xenophobia of a United Kingdom on the cusp of Brexit, an Islamophobia intensified after the 2005 bombings in London, and long-standing racism and transphobia in the gay community, Lahore uses drag to stage politics and to perform her own resilience. In interviews, she emphasizes the widespread visibility (albeit ambivalent acceptance) of khwaja siras (a state-recognized identity category in Pakistan that includes intersex and The various forms of Asian drag, their reception in Asia and elsewhere, and their cultural impact. Queer and trans Asians on the Asian continent and in the diaspora aestheticize gender for the purpose of entertainment, combining multiple performance traditions and historical references to simultaneously invoke community and perform social criticism. As highly visible figures— visible because of theatrical gender expressions, online circulations, and staged performance at festivals, pageants, nightclubs, and parties—Asian drag artists draw on a variety of cultural references that speak to numerous audiences at once. By employing syncretic aesthetics, their performances work in multiple registers that simultaneously engender familiarity, pleasure, and sociopolitical criticism. The performers examined here under the label of “Asian drag” occupy several gender categories— including gay men, otokoyaku, drag kings, hijra, bakla, kathoey, and trans women—and manipulate their femininity and masculinity through staged performance for a variety of reasons: fund-raising, global citizenship, diva worship, income raising, play, entertainment, pleasure, and self-actualization. transgender people; Khan 2014) to argue that drag is not foreign to or abject in Asian culture and communities. She reiterates this logic in her own name, Lahore, the capital city of the Pakistani state of Punjab, inscribing herself into the nation of Pakistan, while embodying the postcolonial nation in the metropole. Her transition, her strategic references to transfeminine communities in Pakistan, her visibility as a drag queen, her purposeful costume choices, her use of online platforms, and her involvement in a variety of queer Asian communities demonstrate the ways that Asian drag artists complicate Western gender/sexuality matrices, enact social critiques, and build community for marginalized populations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Khan, Faris A. “Khwaja Sira: Transgender Activism and Transnationality in Pakistan.” In South Asia in the World: An Introduction, edited by Susan Snow Wadley, 170–184. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014. Kareem Khubchandani Assistant Professor, Department of Drama and Dance and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Tufts University, Medford, MA To make sense of Asian drag’s critical possibilities, it is necessary to consider how gender, sexuality, and race have been policed, colonized, and disciplined (by EuroWestern imperialism, intra-Asian colonization, and statesanctioned hegemonies) to name how artists invoke and/ or interrupt norms. Asian drag must be studied in context, differentiating kathoey dancers from diasporic South Asian drag queens, from Japanese women performing in masculine roles in all-female revues, and so on, as their identity positions and aesthetic techniques both have and summon different histories. Performing Gender: Between Art, Culture, and Everyday Identities Many drag artists manipulate normative aesthetics of masculinity and femininity to incite recognition, pleasure, and discomfort in audiences. For a variety of reasons, the gendered aesthetics of Asian drag are rendered illegible because of a variety of historical and political inequities. Euro-colonial constructs of Asian effeminacy render male Asian performers already feminine within transnational contexts. While Asian men often find themselves the least desirable in American gay nightlife spaces that privilege GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY 479 Drag, Asian masculine self-presentation, the legibility of their bodies as already feminine allows them to succeed at drag pageants that reward portrayals of femininity (Han 2015). At the same time, their competitors read them as having a naturalized advantage, thus dismissing their craft. Furthermore, the legibility of Asian performance styles may not be read as “art.” At the 1998 Diva drag festival in Trinidad, performances by an Indo-Trinidadian couple enacting heterosexual couplings from Hindi and Indo-Trinidadian films did not receive the enthusiastic reception that other performances elicited (Puar 2001). The audience, reading their dances as “just” a performance of their ethnicity, perhaps lacked the intimate cultural knowledge to be moved by the dance’s content, and/or positioned Indianness as perpetually foreign and therefore relegated the performance to everyday Indian “culture” instead of a more sophisticated “interpretation.” Such hierarchical judgments also play out within Asia. A Malaysian transgender performance troupe visiting India in 2004 during the World Social Forum was invited to perform at a party hosted by the social and activist group Gay Bombay, whereas local hijra dancers were not (Shahani 2008). Although hijras (a feminine gender identity in India referring to people assigned male or intersex at birth and ritually inducted into hijra kinship structures) are often photographed and filmed dancing (at festivals or weddings or in straight bars, for example), few scholars writing about hijras critically discuss the aesthetic or pleasurable quality of their dance (Morcom 2013). The Malaysian troupe’s “foreign” style of drag aligned them with the cosmopolitan aspirations of Gay Bombay (Shahani 2008, 251), evidencing hierarchies within local gender/sexual matrices and between Asian countries, bodies, and genders. This pattern repeats itself in the preference of queer and trans dancers in Bangkok for Korean popular music (K-pop) over Thai songs; one reason for their preference is the illegibility of foreign lyrics that allows dancers to focus on movement instead of words. These feminine Thai dancers draw on K-pop to embody more cosmopolitan visions of Pan-Asian femininity (Käng 2014). And yet, even K-pop celebrities perform femininity in queer ways (Oh and Oh 2017), requiring complex layers of analysis to make sense of interAsian appropriations of gender and popular culture. While some scholars argue for a differentiation between drag queens and localized transfeminine identities (Bakshi 2004), one can see in the Gay Bombay example how some transgenders are welcome to perform as “drag queens” in gay male spaces, whereas others are not. More generally, Asian drag confounds the assumptions of drag as a gender “crossing.” Drag is popularly understood as a crossing of a masculine-feminine gender binary for the purposes of entertainment; indeed, some of the artists described here insist on being understood as men who 480 exaggerate femininity for the stage. However, Asian drag does not always rely on binary crossings, given the varying, evolving, nation- and region-specific matrices of gender and sexuality across Asia (Käng 2012); gender categories such as bakla, beki, kothi, and kathoey invoke a variety of feminine male and transfeminine subjectivities and performances. Thai drag queen Pangina Heals, a virtuoso of waacking (an athletic dance emerging from black LGBT communities in California) and hilarious emcee, is the alter ego of Pan Pan Narkprasert, who speaks of himself as a gay man. On Sunday nights in Bangkok, Heals hosts a party and drag show at Maggie Choo’s, an underground bar styled as a 1930s Shanghai speakeasy. Heals’s cast features not only drag queens performing for a cosmopolitan gay audience but also transgender women who know how to play into the global gay aesthetics of bawdy humor, camp, and glamour. Heals has also been one of the few drag queens to compete on the Thai reality TV show T Battle, which more traditionally invites transgender women to participate (Stein 2017). The recognition of kathoey (a Thai gender category typically referring to male-to-female transgender people) by Thai popular media opens up space for a gay queen to perform and become legible, and that queen then opens up spaces for performances by transgender women at the gay club night he hosts. Asian drag can also include heterosexual men. Hailing from the north Indian city of Jaisalmer, Queen Harish is an exceptionally graceful dancer, carefully combining in his performances the kneeling spins of Rajasthani folk dance, daring Indian circus feats such as dancing on broken glass, and demure abhinaya (facial expressions) of Hindi film actresses. Harish has long loved to dance and made a career of it by donning women’s clothing, makeup, and jewelry to perform. Given both his skill and novelty, he was invited to travel with performance troupes outside India where he was received by fellow performers as a “drag queen” and thus acquired the title “Queen Harish” (Roy 2008). In interviews, Harish reminds audiences that he is married to a woman, has children, and regularly goes to the temple, meaning he complies with the Indian state’s heteronormative expectations. Performers such as Harish are no aberration, and he aligns with a long tradition of cross-gender artistry. Indian theater in the early twentieth century included male actors who dressed as women; these men enjoyed popularity on stage even when women could occupy the stage, and they even had their own fan followings (Hansen 2004). Since Harish’s renaming and embrace of “queen,” he has been booked at gay events in the diaspora such as Desilicious in New York City, and he even refers to his art form as “drag.” Another performer at Desilicious, Bijli, describes herself as having a God-given feminine spirit (Malik 2003). While at the nightclub, she discusses wishing GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY Drag, Asian to be desired as a woman, not a gay man or a man in drag. While Desilicious primarily attracts gay men, Queen Harish and Bijli are two performers who might be interpreted by their gay audiences as “drag queens” but occupy quite different identities from each other, as well as from the gay men who constitute their audience. Asian drag thus draws from different gender epistemologies and performance genealogies but also allows for the coexistence, proximity, and overlap of multiple gender identities. Conversing with Religion, Race, and Nation For Bijli, performing at parties such as Desilicious becomes a way of expressing her feminine spirit. Her invocation of “spirit” reveals that Islam is one of the lenses through which she interprets her gender and that dancing her gender constitutes a spiritual practice. For other queens, performing their religious identity might take a more politicized tone. In 2017 a drag queen named Tara Ryst started to perform at Desilicious parties. Her name, meant to sound like terrorist, plays with the racist assumptions—exacerbated exponentially after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States—placed on South Asian, Arab, and Muslim people (Rana 2011). Performing as Tara Ryst therefore becomes a way of subversively occupying the sexual and gender aberrance attributed to Middle Eastern and South Asian people that has been used to justify colonial violence (Puar 2007). At the same time, Tara Ryst’s clever song medleys and salacious dance and costume style please her audience with references to contemporary Pakistani mujras (a salon-style seductive performance; S. Khan 2017) and nostalgic Hindi films. For baklas (a Filipino feminine gender identity referring to people assigned male at birth) living in New York, hosting a drag pageant becomes a means of writing themselves into religious tradition, staging their racial difference, and reframing their positionality to both the United States and the Philippines (Manalansan 2003). Staging the Filipino Catholic ritual of the Santacruzan not as a procession in the Philippines but as a fashion show in New York City in 1992, members of the community health organization Kambal sa Lusog reinvented the various muses traditionally represented in the procession. Instead of carrying the flag of the Philippines, the bakla Queen of the Flag wore a slinky and diaphanous dress in the flag’s colors, sexualizing a symbol usually associated with “virginal and maternal tropes.” Another bakla styled as Judith of Bethulia carried the head of George H. W. Bush, the US president, commenting both on the state of US politics and US imperialism spanning the occupation of the Philippines to the present. Even within Asia, queer and trans performers employ drag to critique national and colonial politics. The Pink Divas, a group of gay, queer, and trans dancers wearing high heels, skirts, sequin blouses, and other feminine garb, perform annually at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival. Following the Supreme Court of India’s recriminalization of sodomy in 2013, the dance group included a sequence in which a drag queen with angel wings pulled a banana out of the pocket of an actor portraying a Supreme Court judge, then fellated and ate it. Section 377 of the Indian penal code is a relic of Victorian British law that criminalizes acts “against the order of nature”; it remains in the penal codes of several British colonies (Narrain and Gupta 2011). During the Supreme Court of India hearings, the judges were more concerned with debating what counted as acts against the order of nature rather than discussing the dignity and safety of gender and sexual minorities. The simulation of this sexual act by the drag queen ridiculed the conservative Indian judges’ obsession over perverse acts, as well as colonial law, much to the pleasure of the cheering audience. In September 2018 India’s Supreme Court once again struck down the application of Section 377 against acts of sodomy. Alongside the legacies of Euro-Western imperialisms, intra-Asian colonization shapes the political and performative efficacies of Asian drag. In the case of otokoyaku (women performing male roles in the Japanese, all-female Takarazuka Revue), their debonair personas are determined to be in excess of modest Japanese masculinity. This exaggerated masculinity performed by women couples with caricatured performances of non-Japanese Others in the Takarazuka Revue to secure, via the stage, notions of a naturalized, quotidian, nontheatrical Japanese colonial masculinity (Robertson 1998). Interestingly, Taiwanese artists also use drag to respond to the legacy of Japanese colonization. Fanchuanxiu is a Taiwanese male cross-dressing genre that uses a variety of recorded music for its artists to lip-synch. Employing nostalgic enka tracks (Japanese ballads) alongside other Japanese signifiers, artists invite their audiences to ambivalently engage with the ubiquity of Japanese popular culture in Taiwan (Wu 2017). Popular Culture, Circulation, and Virality The American reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–) has provided an important international media platform for drag artists in the United States to stage their craft and their politics. Through sartorial choices—such as Kim Chi’s elaborate take on the traditional Korean hanbok dress and Manila Luzon’s Filipino flag dress and her pineapple outfit—the queens reflect their ethnic and national heritage (Zhang 2016). At the same time, Asian queens on Drag Race have turned to racial performances that do not necessarily reflect their own ethnonational heritage: riffing on the Japanese geisha, appropriating the Chinese cheongsam, styling themselves as Latina cholas (part of the Mexican American women’s hip-hop subculture), and modeling “African chic.” These Asian queens’ strange stylings are reminders of how recalcitrant Orientalisms flatten complex differences between Asians GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY 481 Drag, Asian and limit the ways that Asian queens can present themselves as racialized subjects. Beyond RuPaul’s Drag Race, Asian drag artists struggle to find similar global success or even a platform on which to perform. Narrative theater productions function as sites to imagine what Asian drag could look like if it were given room to thrive. The heterogeneity of Asian drag is enacted in plays such as The Gentlemen’s Club (Mumbai, 2015), about intergenerational tensions at a Mumbai drag king cabaret, and Miss Meena and the Masala Queens (London, 2017), about conflicts between South Asian queens in a British nightclub. While drag is associated with nightclubs, in India, middle- and upper-class gay nightlife largely bans “cross-dressing,” excluding both transgender people and drag artists. As such, artists such as Maya the Drag Queen look to the internet—TEDx, Instagram, and Facebook—as a platform to accrue audiences. Many Asian drag queens have “gone viral” online. A 2010 video of a bakla artist lipsynching Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” as a zombie haunting her lover has garnered millions of views. A 2007 video showing the collective choreography of Filipino inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” has received over 58 million views and prominently features Wenjiel Resane, a feminine performer in a sea of male zombies (Perillo 2011). The Instagram uploads of Apichet “Madaew” Atirattana, in which he films himself in makeshift haute couture, evidence how online circulation becomes especially useful to young rural Asians who do not have access to the monetary resources expected of drag artists nor the urban nightlife associated with drag cultures. For Mumbai-raised, Chicago-based drag artist Abhijeet Rane, web-based and live performances are mutually constitutive. The acclaimed Instagram photo series Bad Beti’s features Rane styled as twelve South Asian women and femmes who refuse(d) to conform to gender expectations. Following the popular reception of this photo series, Rane curated a party at Berlin nightclub in Chicago titled Bad Beti’s featuring Asian drag acts (Moran 2017). The performers (South Asian, Korean, Japanese, and mixed race) drew from a range of musical references to stage Asianness in this nightclub: from the Orientalist stylings of Madonna, to Disney’s Aladdin and Mulan, to K-pop, and video-game theme songs. The eclectic musical samplings lip-synched by the performers in Bad Beti’s provide a reminder that Orientalist visions continue to structure the perception and performance of Asian genders, but that Asian drag artists can use these familiar referents, as well as many others, to invite the audience into community and to critique the colonial discourses placed on their bodies. Bakla; Cross-Dressing in the West; Hijras; Kathoey; Performance Artists in Latin America; Thai K-Pop; Transgender Identity in Iranian Cinema; Transvestites/Transsexuals SEE ALSO 482 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakshi, Sandeep. “A Comparative Analysis of Hijras and Drag Queens: The Subversive Possibilities and Limits of Parading Effeminacy and Negotiating Masculinity.” Journal of Homosexuality 46, nos. 3–4 (2004): 211–223. Han, C. Winter. Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Hansen, Kathryn. “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, Gujarati, and Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, edited by Sanjay Srivastava, 99–122. New Delhi: Sage, 2004. Käng, Dredge Byung’Chu. “Kathoey ‘in Trend’: Emergent Genderscapes, National Anxieties, and the Re-signification of Male-Bodied Effeminacy in Thailand.” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012): 475–494. Käng, Dredge Byung’Chu. “Idols of Development: Transnational Transgender Performance in Thai K-pop Cover Dance.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (2014): 559–571. Khan, Faris A. “Khwaja Sira: Transgender Activism and Transnationality in Pakistan.” In South Asia in the World: An Introduction, edited by Susan Snow Wadley, 170–184. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014. Khan, Saad. “‘We Navigate a Man’s World in Female Bodies’: Surviving as a Modern Mujra Dancer in Pakistan.” Scroll.in, 9 June 2017. https://scroll.in/magazine/839997/we-navigate -a-mans-world-in-female-bodies-surviving-as-a-modern-mujra -dancer-in-pakistan Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Moran, Justin. “Bad Beti: New Chicago Party to Empower AsianAmerican Drag Scene.” Out, 17 May 2017. http://www.out .com/nightlife/2017/5/17/bad-beti-new-chicago-party-empower -asian-american-drag-scene Morcom, Anna. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Narrain, Arvind, and Alok Gupta, eds. Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011. Oh, Chuyun, and David C. Oh. “Unmasking Queerness: Blurring and Solidifying Queer Lines through K-pop Cross-Dressing.” Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 9–29. Perillo, J. Lorenzo. “‘If I Was Not in Prison, I Would Not Be Famous’: Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines.” Theatre Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 607–621. Puar, Jasbir K. “Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2001): 1039–1065. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Rana, Junaid. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Roy, Sandip. “Queen Harish Dances in Drag.” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 July 2008. http://www.sfgate.com/entertain ment/article/Queen-Harish-dances-in-drag-3276039.php GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY Dyketactics! Shahani, Parmesh. Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love, and (Be)longing in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage, 2008. Stein, Matthew. “Meet the RuPaul of Thailand.” Ozy, 25 February 2017. http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/meet-the -rupaul-of-thailand/66713 Wu, Chao-Jung. “Performing Hybridity: The Music and Visual Politics of Male Cross-Dressing Performance in Taiwan.” In Perverse Taiwan, edited by Howard Chiang and Yin Wang, 131–160. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. Zhang, Eric. “Memoirs of a Gay! Sha: Race and Gender Performance on RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Studies in Costume and Performance 1, no. 1 (2016): 59–75. FILMOGRAPHY Malik, Adnan, dir. Bijli. Adnan Malik Productions, 2003. Documentary. Dyketactics! PAOLA BACCHETTA Professor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies University of California, Berkeley Radical activist organization of lesbians of all colors, active in Philadelphia in the 1970s. Dyketactics! is an anarchist, anti-colonial, anti-racism, and anti-capitalist collective of self-identified dykes of all colors, founded in 1975 in Philadelphia. Today, Dyketactics! is most renowned as the first LGBTQI+ group in the United States to take a city to court for engaging in police brutality specifically against LGBTQI+ peoples. However, Dyketactics! engaged in direct-action struggle on many other issues, too (Bacchetta 2009). The members of Dyketactics! were black, indigenous, Puerto Rican, racially mixed, Filipina, white, Jewish (both white and of color), and Asian and thereby, for such a small group, somewhat reflective of lesbian populations in the United States. The members ranged in age from nineteen to thirty. The majority of Dyketactics! members were raised in working-class families, but the collective also included a few members from middle-class families. During the most active period of the group between 1975 and 1978, Dyketactics! members lived together collectively in two houses in West Philadelphia. Many of them also worked together at Alexandria Books, a collectively run nonprofit feminist and queer bookstore in central Philadelphia. The housemates and other members had met in LGBTQI+ and other social movements. Most members had come out of prior social movement formations that were not LGBTQI+ specific and remained closely aligned with them or simultaneously within them: black liberation, socialist, communist or anarchist, Native American, student, Puerto Rican independence, and more. Dyketactics! was part of the most radically critical wing of LGBTQI+ movements and of many other movements against colonialism and capitalism, including Native American and black liberation movements, the movement for Puerto Rican independence, and the workers movements of the day. Dyketactics! v. the City of Philadelphia The major Dyketactics! struggle against police brutality began when Dyketactics! members were brutally beaten by police at a queer labor rights demonstration on 4 December 1975. Dyketactics! had been called on by its communities to participate in a LGBTQI+ demonstration during an official meeting of the city council inside City Hall to demand that Bill 1275, a citywide bill that outlawed antigay discrimination, be passed. The bill had been brought up for many years in city council and had been dismissed every time without discussion. With the hope of preventing this from reoccurring, many LGBTQI+ organizations came together to watch over the process. The plan was to sit in the public audience section of the city council meeting room with banners indicating a strong LGBTQI+ presence. The night before the session, Dyketactics! members had created two large banners: “You Will Never Have the Comfort of Our Silence Again!” and “Dykes Ignite.” That day, they marched together to City Hall and entered the building and then the council session room, holding the banners. The council session room was filled with LGBTQI+ activists. It was also heavily attended by journalists. It was “guarded” by Philadelphia’s Civil Defense Squad (CDS), a special militarized contingent of “riot police” in Philadelphia that had been created by the then right-wing mayor Frank Rizzo, who was formerly the police chief of Philadelphia. Midway into the meeting, the bill came up. The city council voted once again not to bring it to the floor for discussion. When that decision was announced, demonstrators began chanting “Free Bill 1275,” while Dyketactics! members lifted the group’s banners. With the first cries, the CDS moved in, targeted Dyketactics! members one by one, and brutally beat them up. Sometimes it took four or five CDS men to control one Dyketactics! member. Dyketactics! members defended themselves but also fought back. The CDS men violently dragged wounded Dyketactics! members outside the session room, down a long hallway, and threw some of them separately into smaller rooms. Eventually most Dyketactics! members, albeit having sustained significant injuries, found their way into the same part of the hallway. Other Dyketactics! members arrived on the scene and raised a giant witch puppet that belonged to the theater GLOBAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDER, AND QUEER HISTORY 483