The Big Reveal
An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag
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- 24,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“Drag embodies the queer possibility that exists within each of us—the infinite ways in which gender, good taste, and art can be lived.”
–Sasha Velour
This book is a quilt, piecing together memoir, history, and theory into a living portrait of an artist and an art. Within these pages, illustrated throughout with photos and original artwork, Sasha Velour illuminates drag as a unique form of expression with a rich history and a revolutionary spirit.
Each chapter strips off a new layer, removing one tantalizing glove and then another, to reveal all the twists and turns in the life of a queen. As Sasha recalls her own journey, from the women who raised her, to learning the craft of an artist, to success, disaster, and more, she also uncovers the history of queer life around the world that made it all possible.
From shamans to “fairies balls,” empresses to RuPaul’s Drag Race (and beyond), The Big Reveal chronicles and celebrates our shared queer pasts. “If we want to be seen as legendary,” writes Sasha, “we have to weave ourselves into history.”
From an iconoclastic drag queen comes an equally singular, thought-provoking manifesto that brings necessary and sparkling substance to our understanding of drag, queerness, beauty, and liberation!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this showstopping debut, Velour, creator of the Brooklyn drag revue NightGowns and winner of RuPaul's Drag Race season nine, interweaves her autobiography with the cultural history of drag. Placing her own achievements within the context of the gay rights movement and breakthroughs by previous drag artists, Velour recounts how the Stonewall riots and the emergence of queer theory and grassroots LGBTQ community movements in the 1980s and '90s influenced the creation of NightGowns and her zine Velour. Elsewhere, memories of lip-syncing to Whitney Houston's "So Emotional" on RuPaul's Drag Race lead to a study of gender-inclusive theater in China and Japan, and profiles of 1920s drag aerialist Barbette, who "flew into the air like an ‘angel, a flower, a bird' (as Jean Cocteau put it), draped in white ostrich with a platinum finger wave"; José Sarria, winner of San Francisco's "first big drag pageant"; and Josephine Baker. Velour seamlessly mixes rigorous scholarship with inspirational aphorisms ("Beautiful relationships don't need to last forever to make deep shifts in your life") and heartfelt anecdotes about finding community and navigating the pitfalls of mainstream success, while enriching the narrative with copious photographs and illustrations. This is a rousing tribute to a revolutionary art form and its practitioners.
