\"Dirty Dragging\" — A Book by Evelyn Annuß on Queer Performance Under Racism and Nazism

In June 2026, mdwPress published the book “Dirty Dragging: Performative Transpositions” in English. A German-language edition had appeared from the same press in December 2025. The author is Evelyn Annuß, professor of gender studies and director of the International Research Center for Gender and Performativity at mdw — Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria). The research was developed at Freie Universität Berlin under the DFG Heisenberg program of the German Research Foundation.

The book revisits queer theories of drag from a transnational and transoceanic perspective. Drag performance is a form of theatrical representation in which a performer adopts clothing and mannerisms associated with a different gender, often in an artistic or exaggerated way. Annuß examines this practice not in isolation, but in relation to three historical systems of racial and political violence: Nazi Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and the Jim Crow regime in the United States.

Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation and white minority rule in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The Jim Crow laws were a set of statutes that enforced racial segregation across the American South from roughly the 1870s to the mid-1960s. In each of these contexts, Annuß investigates how performative practices could simultaneously subvert established boundaries of identity and be deployed as instruments of oppression.

The book gives particular attention to blackface — a performance tradition in which artists (typically white performers) darkened their faces to portray Black people, often in a stereotypical and demeaning manner. Annuß analyzes blackface as a racialized form of performative transgression and examines it in relation to queer performance traditions.

Another central concept in the book is creolization — the process by which different cultural traditions blend and generate new hybrid forms. Annuß applies this term to the analysis of queer and carnivalesque performance modes, showing how they created spaces of collective resistance under conditions of racism and authoritarian rule.

The study spans three geographic regions: South Africa, the United States, and Alpine Europe. In each setting, Annuß traces how similar performative practices took on different political meanings depending on their historical context. The book also addresses the present, framing queer performance as a form of collective response to rising authoritarianism.