"You all are sisters! We are all family!" The construction of parenthood in 'RuPaul's Drag Race'

Drag queens epitomise gender fluidity, where the heteronormative binarism male/female is blurred and parodied. Their unconventional nature is reflected in the structure of their community, where they have created alternatives to the heteronormative family, which is historically based on heterosexual marriage and parenthood. Drag families are to be seen as places of personal and financial support, a refuge for young gay men who have been rejected by their “real” families and have financial problems. This study seeks to give prominence to the construction of parenthood in RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-2021) by analysing the discourse – i. e. the system of statements – around drag family, parenthood and sisterhood in a corpus of 174 episodes. The research is carried out in the light of Corpus Linguistics, with the use of #Lancsbox, a software for the analysis of language data and corpora.

Readings Behind the Early Christian Queer Experiences

This paper deals with the ideas of queer experiences in the Early Christian movement, seen through early Christian epistemologies of gender and patristic thought focused on sex differences. The lives and passions of transgender nuns are used in discussing various aspects of gender fluidity in early Christianity. Theoretically, the paper rests on the idea of the performativity of gender, that is, on the ways gender was constructed and how body modifications enabled renegotiation of gender categories. It also focuses on the social context of queer experiences in the late antique period with regard to Roman social norms.

Gender-sensitive Portrayal in Cartoon Shows for Preschoolers: A Critical Analysis of Masha and the Bear

Most of the studies on children’s programming conducted in America or India, indicating an unbalanced and stereotypical gender representation, remain limited to those on older children. The present study explores if cartoon shows for preschoolers resort to the counter-hegemonic portrayal of male/female characters, and if thereby have any scope for representation of gender fluidity within it. Consequently, it also attempts to discern the ways in which interpersonal relationships between the protagonists, and between the protagonist(s) and the secondary character(s) portray any ‘dominant/submissive’ dichotomies. Drawing on Bandura’s ‘Social Learning Theory’ and de Beauvoir’s notion of the social construction of women as the ‘other’, this study presents the results of textual analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis of a popular Russian cartoon show ‘Masha and the Bear’ (M&TB) telecast on Nick Jr. The study findings indicate more gender-sensitive representation in the show for preschoolers than those for the older children. Bearing the tropes of Soviet Russian egalitarian and cultural traits, the characters of M&TB portray non-binary gender roles compared to their American or Indian counterparts.

Materialising Gender-fluidity through Fashion

As the final year comprehensive design project for the Honours Degree of Bachelor of Design, Department of Integrated Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, I have selected a project which is based upon my own clothing brand. It is an emerging ready-to-wear clothing brand based in Sri Lanka, which was launched in August 2020 through the Colombo Fashion Week named “HARID”. Currently, HARID retails at the Design Collective store in Colombo for a consumer group based upon it. The brand philosophy of HARID is to challenge gender-related stereotypical concepts. As the brand identity, HARID uses heritage craft practices.

Ideals of ‘Britishness’ reproduced in the musical adaptation of David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress at the Royal Shakespeare Company

This article examines the use and purpose of the nostalgic interventions in the latest Royal Shakespeare musical, The Boy in the Dress, and considers the implications of utilizing a mythologized, rose-tinted past on the creative production of national identity. It questions the meanings which are produced when a government subsidized, national theatre company with an international reputation eliminates the female voice from the stage and represents the United Kingdom as English, predominantly white and middle class. In addition, this article deconstructs the performances of gender fluidity depicted in the show and widens the acknowledged interpretation of cultural appropriation, when applied to race, to include gender.

Rewriting the Western: Transnational Dimensions and Gender Fluidity in Sebastian Barry’s Days without End

The present essay will explore the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s transnational rendering of the American West in his novel Days without End (2016), emphasizing his representation of neglected western questions and realities and his revision of traditional western tropes and archetypes. Barry’s approach to the American West in Days without End moves beyond the regional and national imagery of this territory, revealing its international and hybrid properties and its multiple and overlapping cultures. It is argued that Barry’s recreation of a different reality from the traditional western monomyth of masculinity, individualism, and Anglo-American conquest allows him to challenge classical frontier narratives and to address international and transcultural issues, such as gender fluidity. The novel, whose main protagonist and narrator is a poor, homosexual Irish immigrant, embraces a different West, questioning romanticized versions of the westward expansion and drawing interesting connections between the Irish immigrants in this region and the Native Americans. Overall, Days without End may be viewed as an acute depiction of the transnational dimension of the American West, proving the power of the Western to overcome its traditional formulaic and mythic boundaries and to travel across global spaces.