Gender as a scientific and artistic experience: the display of metaperformative competence in walking practices

Abstract

Drawing from a fieldwork conducted on French speaking drag king workshops in Brussels (Belgium), and based on a video recording data, I will focus on walking practices mobilized by participants in bodily gendered transformation practices and approached as gender (de)construction devices. My analysis deals with walking exercises following the make-up activity, through which participants can feel and experiment a new gendered body thanks to locomotive actions and verbal accounts referring to what they experienced. The embodied (i.e. sensorial and kinesthetic) and the experiential dimensions at work in these practices allow us to shed a light on the manufacturing of performativity, i.e. how participants adopt a reflexive stance vis-à-vis of their gendered bodily transformations, a metaperformative competence, and how, in this way, participants position themselves as the scientists and the creators of their own bodily creations.

Keywords

• drag kings
• walking
• experience
• metaperformative competences
• sociolinguistics