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Let me be frank: drag queens have a share in theatre and dance history, but you would not know it before reading this book. Selby Wynn Schwartz's The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives intervenes in such an absence with her notion of "drag's afterlife." Schwartz's study explores what drag queens do given the ontological conundrum of theatrical femininity in queer theory, feminism, and theatre and performance studies, where it is assumed to be inauthentic, never truly embodied, a parody. In fact, theatrical femininity is rarely treated like it is in this book: held close, adored, and often mourned. As a refusal of dominant narratives that figure drag performance as a campy mockery of the unreal category "Woman" (134), Schwartz posits a non-biological notion of womanhood for theatre and dance studies. This is a trans feminist reading of drag dance, where "the feminine 'real'" is open to the many "bodies that reach toward it" (27).
The Bodies of Others presents an argument for reimagining drag's centrality to histories and practices of dance theatre. Across five chapters, the book follows drag soloists and dance troupes, drawing on dance history to contest exclusionary claims about rightful inheritances of repertoire. From here, Schwartz contests the idea that there is a "right" body to dance a particular role, and each chapter moves from the coercive choreographies of gender in dance training to a series of strategies for their undoing. The book concludes by demonstrating how drag dance complicates the notion of...