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Public lecture: Dirty Dragging. On Political Violence and Performativity

Please join WiCDS and the Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ School of Arts (WSOA) for a public lecture from Professor Evelyn Annuß from the University of Performing Arts in Vienna.

Against the backdrop of a globalizing drift toward authoritarian forms of governing and accompanying resentment politics, the lecture examines two complementary drag scenes in the historical contexts of apartheid and National Socialism. Drawing on photographic sources from the GALA Archive at Ñî¹óåú´«Ã½ and the Bavarian State Library in Munich, it discusses the current afterlife of different forms of political violence as well as the potential of performative defiance across time and space. By reformulating existing queer theoretical approaches to drag, the lecture foregrounds the situatedness of performative practices and their entanglement with specific societal and political contexts. Bringing South African and German archival materials into dialogue, it asks how transoceanic perspectives might help to counter current processes of fascization.

Evelyn Annuß is a cultural and theatre studies scholar, professor of Gender Studies and head of the International Research Center Gender and Performativity (ICGP) at mdw, the University of Performing Arts Vienna. Her most recent publications include Facing Drag: Gender Bending and Racialized Masking in Performing Arts and Popular Culture (edited with Raz Weiner, mdwPress, 2025) and Dirty Dragging: Performative Transpositions (mdwPress, 2026).

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