2022 DLS SEXUALITIES: Harris Kornstein

21st CENTURY DRAG: Queer Play from Social Media to Story Hour
October 12, 2022 | 6 PM
Over the past decade, drag performance has captured mainstream attention through television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, transforming a queer performance practice once relegated to gay bars into a sensation that can be found on screens large and small, in classrooms and libraries, and at corporate and state functions. But what actually constitutes drag? And what kinds of cultural impacts can it have as its spotlight shines in new sorts of spaces?
In this talk, Harris Kornstein will discuss research into two of drag’s more recent frontiers: digital performances of identity via social media, and children’s story hours. Drawing on their own performance practice, Kornstein looks beyond discourses of gender or sexuality, and instead focuses on the ways drag disrupts binaries of truth and fiction, visibility and privacy, and pleasure and politics.
About the Speaker
Harris Kornstein is an assistant professor of Public & Applied Humanities in the College of Humanities. Kornstein is a scholar and artist whose research and art practice focuses on digital culture, surveillance, data and algorithms, media art/activism, visual culture, and queer theory. Their current book project documents queer and trans cultural strategies that mobilize techniques of play, misuse, and obfuscation to counter surveillance capitalism. As a media artist, curator, and drag queen, they have presented work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and numerous other universities, galleries, and festivals. Kornstein has also served on the board of Drag Queen Story Hour.