Devenir le King : la perte de soi entre auto-ethnographie et performance

Abstract

Drawing from fieldwork I conducted in Brussels with a group of drag kings in which I experience myself to perform a male character, and from my practice of dance and performance, I will focus my analysis on what I call “losing the self”. By “losing the self”, I mean a moment in which social actors, in the framework of a gendered and embodied transformational activity, experience to come out from the self and to welcome into one’s own body a desired self, and to becoming something/someone new. The analysis of this moment I experienced in the field, in which the transition from observer to participant status took place, and in which I experienced the transition from an assigned at birth masculinity to a king masculinity, allows me to highlight some central points for gender studies and performance studies, in particular, and for the social sciences, in general: How to think of transformational processes through a multidimensional perspective (i.e. verbal, tactile, visual, material) taking into account its public, reflexive, multimodal and indexical dimensions? Finally, how can we rethink the boundaries between observation and participation, art and life, and to think of science through the lens of experience and becoming?

Keywords

• experience
• field
• gender
• performance
• reflexivity
• touching