“From now on, you have to gender me as masculine”, corrects Johanna, 39, who wished to remain anonymous like her comrades. Facing the mirror, tucked into his demure turtleneck, which has become Hayden la Vidange, he enhances the broad brown line under his cheekbones with a bold off-white blush, to highlight his jaw. THE contouring – a makeup technique allowing the contours of the face to be redefined – marks the first stage of his transformation into a drag king, a practice aimed at reinvesting the codes of masculinity, where drag queens portray femininities. Exit Johanna therefore, this woman long consumed by shyness, inhabited by gender identity conflicts in the past.
Sheltered from the cold of this Friday in January, in the intimate dressing rooms of the Théâtre Clavel in the 19e district of Paris, Hayden la Vidange and eight other drag kings are busy. Only a few hours left before the start of the show marking the 5th anniversary of the Kings Factory, a collective supporting French artists, born in 2019, since transformed into an association. Lesbian, bisexual, transgender, gender fluidqueer… Most of the nine members found in the artistic practice of drag king the means, among other things, to explore and affirm their gender identity and/or their sexual orientation.
Much less publicized than that of queens, the French kings scene remains no less vibrant in France. From the first shows in cramped Parisian cellars to the formation of the collective in 2019, and to the Musée du quai Branly, in Paris, where they will offer a performance on Saturday March 2 as part of the evening “Ethnology will surprise you! The body “these artists describe a teeming environment, hoping to move from the shadows to the light with the general public.
Because if drag has largely burst into homes with the success of the two seasons of the show “Drag Race France”, launched in 2022 on France 2, only queens have been candidates, crowning Paloma then Keiona in turn. Of course, drag kings appeared there, but as guests in one episode only. We were able to discover Jesus la Vidange – co-founder of Kings Factory with Thomas Occhio and inspiration for several artists who took up his stage name – but also one of his disciples, Juda la Vidange, and Chico.
“Very anchored in a feminist culture”
To think that the practice of drag-king was born in the 2010s would be a mistake, warns Luca Greco, professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Lorraine, author of Behind the scenes of gender: the making of oneself among Drag Kings (Lambert-Lucas, 2018): “In France, people assigned female at birth experienced subversive bodily subjectivities well before, particularly with the figure of the flapper in the 1920s.” Appearing in the 1980s on lesbian and alternative scenes in New York, San Francisco, Berlin and London, the highly politicized practice of drag king arrived in France at the very end of the 1990s. Transgender researchers and activists at the The image of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Paul B. Preciado or the sociologist Sam Bourcier then organize workshops.
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