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What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance

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What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance

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What’s the Wig Deal?:
Exploring the Use of Wigs and Head Accessories in Queer Performance
by
Diego Dela Rosa

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May 2023

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures……………………………………….………………….……………………….iii
Abstract……………………………………………………..…………………………………...iv
Introduction………………………………………………………………...…………………….1
Chapter One: A Historical Revue of Wigs………….……………………………………..…...8

Chapter Two: The Dragging of the Wigs……………………….………..…………………...15

Chapter Three: The Wigs that Keep on Giving………………………………………………27

Conclusion………………………………………………………..……………………………..37

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….38

iii

List of Figures

Figure 1 The British Museum, Ancient Greek Mask………………………………………..9
Figure 2 Joan Marcus, Photograph of Twelfth Night………………………………………11
Figure 3 Rigaud Hyacinthe, Portrait of Louis XIV………………………………………..13
Figure 4 Promotional Flyer for The Queen………………………………………………..16
Figure 5 Jennie Livingston, Photo still of Pepper LaBeija from Paris is Burning………..18
Figure 6 Photo still of Symone from RuPaul's Drag Race………………………………..20
Figure 7 Jack Smith, Self-Photograph ……………………………………………………25
Figure 8 Photo of Ron Athey's Acephalous Monster……………………………………...28
Figure 9 Photo of Nao Bustamante's Silver & Gold……………………………………….32

iv

Abstract
The activation of the queer body as art itself through performance was something that
deeply resonated with me and my academic interests, thus inspiring me to focus on it for this
project. As a queer person of color who has a background in performance, queer studies, and
popular culture, the goal of this thesis is to combine those interests to provide insight on the
legacy and use of wigs and headpieces by queer performance artists. More specifically, it will
explore how queer performers comment on gender and sexuality in their practice through the use
of these accessories. This thesis will explore the history of wigs in queer performance, as well as
how contemporary artists use these props in their practice/as tools to supplement their artistic
intentions. Although they are packed with meaning as static objects, this thesis will utilize
historical contexts and case studies to exemplify how wigs/head accessories are activated by
performers. Wigs and head accessories transform the body of the artist, and the potential power
that lies in those transformative properties is often overlooked. By transforming the body, these
wigs/accessories queerify the performance by displaying the liminality of gender, as well as
pointing out relational qualities that exist between and outside of the artist and the viewer.

1

Introduction
My first performing gigs didn’t pay much, and the venue wasn’t great either: a dugout
full of teenage girls where wafts of air would smell like sweat, softball pants that at one point
were white, and the hollow shells of saliva-covered sunflower seeds stripped of all of their salt
before being spit out. My agent was my older sister, who was the starting pitcher on the team,
and her favorite client was me: a four year old ham who had a singing repertoire that ranged
from gibberish opera to impressionistic interpretations of early 2000 pop songs I would hear on
the radio. My relationship with the audience was a symbiotic one, I loved them and the feeling
was mutual. Even though they were a decade older, I became a mascot of my sister’s teams and I
adored being able to entertain them before a game or after a practice. My mom says that’s when
she first knew I had something special in me, an ability to make sure I was seen and heard.
There was no room in my non-existent budget for me to hire a stage manager, so my
developing mind had to be sharp and resourceful. A bat as a microphone. A bag of peanut
M&Ms for percussion. A jacket for a wig. The wigs were always a big hit with the girls on the
team, as I would haphazardly throw the zip-up my parents packed me on my head and transform
into a soprano primadonna or another one of the feminine acts in my wheelhouse, the ones I
secretly had the most fun with.
As the years went by, I started to play sports myself, which meant trading in my
makeshift wigs for football helmets instead. My dad is one of the best sports coaches I know, and
his presence in my life combined with my Tonka Truck build meant that sports were my bread
and butter for much of my adolescence. I enjoyed playing sports, but from a young age I knew
there was something different about me in relation to the other offensive linemen. As a child of
the internet, I wondered if my teammates visited the same Tumblr pages and YouTube clips as I

2

did, and as the social conditioning of the forces policing binary gender began to pressure our
pubescent minds I became doubtful that they also watched a bootlegged copy of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show on their home desktops.
One day I stumbled upon a YouTube compilation video of RuPaul’s Drag Race and
became an internet archaeologist of sorts. Throughout high school, I completed my mission to
watch every single episode of the franchise, as well as being an active contributor to the online
databases dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of every queen who walked that
runway. My freshman year at USC I wore the title of Fluor Tower’s resident Rupaul’s Drag
Race expert with an immense amount of pride. I found a group of people in my dorm building
who were interested in watching the season that was airing, and we began to come together to
have viewing parties each week. Our eclectic crew of undergraduate vagabonds became a
judging panel itself, as we would comment and bicker about the queen’s looks and performances
from the comfort of our very uncomfortable carpeted dorm room floor. We all came from
different backgrounds, but what tied us together was our love for this piece of media that
documented queer performance through the fabric of a produced reality television series.
As classes picked up, we would apply different academic readings to support our
opinions. Susan Sontag and Judith Butler became cemented beacons of queer truth we would
often cite to each other, as our viewing group slowly became a book club for foundational queer
texts. In the cloud of freshman year naivete, we didn’t realize we were only scratching the
surface with the world of queer performance pedagogy and research. However, to say our
activities together were futile would be a disservice. The exposure to queer literature and
discourse fundamentally changed the trajectory of my academic pursuits by validating queer
bodies and art as something that did not have to solely exist on the fringes of my online chat

3

boards. I never imagined that the culture and community I loved so much would be so respected
in academic fields. More importantly, I realized that they are valid just by being.
In the same sense, I realized that I was valid in my own queer existence. Sure, I was out
and comfortable in my queerness by the time I was in college, but there were a lot of aspects of
my experience and desires that I would still suppress. Thus, I became inspired to embrace my
queerness in a way that seemed familiar to me: outward performance. I bought my first skirt and
headpiece for a Halloween costume I was going to wear for marching band practice, an annual
tradition where everyone dresses as their band nickname. Mine is Teacher’s Pet. Nothing too
crazy; bunny ears, a pink schoolgirl skirt I was able to find on Amazon, black cat stockings, and
a white button up shirt I tied at the waist. As I finished getting ready I looked in the mirror and
felt my anxiety begin to overwhelm me. My brain had transformed the two minute walk from my
dorm to band practice into a mile long trek where I would be judged, harassed, and chastised.
Before taking off my costume and scrapping the whole outfit, I locked eyes with myself in the
mirror and began to feel an energy of sorts (a mixture of excitement and shame) course through
my veins. Although I was scared, something activated inside of me. All of the right wires were
crossing in the moment, and it became clear that I was using my physical vessel to activate queer
theories and rhetoric of expression that I had fallen in love with. Even though I wasn’t sure if I
could fully grasp the theory behind much of the queer rhetoric, there was no denying that I was
able to live it with this look. My costume was a huge hit, and those wardrobe pieces were the
first items in my ever growing collection of props and wigs I use and lend to friends for whatever
hairy situations we find ourselves in.
From that day on, my academic focus became oriented towards queer performance and
storytelling. I mainly focused on the practice of those performances, acting and writing scripts

4

that allowed me to navigate the world of expression. My work is often rooted in irreverence,
whimsy, and denying the objectification that I was subjected to by being funneled into sports and
other hobbies that aligned with the masculinity I was born into. These were topics that meant a
lot to me outside of performance, but ones I felt like I could interact with on a day-to-day basis
considering the context of the violently political world around me. Expression gave me a chance
to address and combat that rhetoric by weaponizing my identity and being through art. Through
that artistic practice, my queerness becomes undeniable and valid. I realized I was no longer
interested in acting for commercials or six-figure contracts; my heart was set on pushing the
boundaries of performance and making capital-A art.
With this clarity, I became more confident in that sphere, I began to dip my toes in the
academic side of queer performance studies. For one, I began collecting oral histories for the
USC Folklore Archives, focusing on collecting and preserving the stories and tales of friends and
community members around me. A large focus of the interviews I collected dealt with active
members of queer nightlife and the rituals they would take before they went out to their social
events. Craving more context about the history and rhetoric of performance, I enrolled in a class
housed in the “Critical Studies” department at the Roski School of Art and Design. There I
learned that performance art did not have to be confined to the scripted works or conventional
blackbox theaters, but could exist in the everyday world through nightlife and TV shows,
disrupting rigid structures between the performer and the viewer. I realized that my queer
interests of drag, performance, and wigs were rich with meaning and nuance.
Frameworks, or The Power of Queer Subjectivity
The personal information provided in this introduction is not to center this thesis on
myself or make it an autobiographical study. It is included to offer context on how this thesis

5

came to fruition and to validate the role of subjective interests in academia, especially the
interests of identities that are often marginalized, such as mine. To pretend that academic works
are rooted in pure objectivity is to set false expectations, and to deny the experience of the author
as a valid source of information. In fact, as queer theorist Jack Judith Halberstam points out:
In academia, many of us love to imagine ourselves in relation to rubrics
[...] but few are willing to give up on the legitimizing practices that the
academy demands—demonstrating expertise, authorizing one’s project by
citing the same names that everyone else cites, referencing the agreed
upon archive for that topic. It is those very practices [...] that produce the
hierarchies of knowledge production that ensure that dominant knowledge
is reproduced and that other forms of knowing become “disqualified” in
the same process. If we are to get serious about subjugated knowledges,
we have to break with some formulaic methods of academic
legitimization.
1

I provide my background as knowledge to try and legitimize personal and subjective
experiences in the larger scope of rigid academic structures. As someone who has utilized and
collected oral histories, I know the power of personal stories. Oftentimes, we subjugate our lived
experiences as invalid because we do not think they could exist credibly in professional or
academic settings but it is vital to use these sources of power to diversify the sources of

1
Jack Judith Halberstam,“Losing Hope, Finding Nemo and Dreaming of Alternatives” in Rethinking Research and
Professional Practices in Terms of Relationality, Subjectivity and Power: Queer and Subjugated Knowledges:
Generating Subversive Imaginaries, ed. Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies. (Bentham Science Publishers Ltd,
2012.), 10.

6

knowledge to ensure the canons of literature and art continue to evolve and are not gate kept by
an echo chamber of a few academics. In fact, feminist researcher and writer Lauren Fournier
asserts the importance of “autotheory” which “refers to the integration of theory and philosophy
with autobiography, the body, and other so-called personal and subjective modes.”
2
Autotheory
allows for “a self-conscious way of engaging with theory” which is “in the Zeitgeist of cultural
production today-- especially in feminist, queer, and BIPOC [...] spaces that live on the edges of
art and academia.”
3
Autotheory is especially powerful in regard to queer studies, which rely on
personal experiences and accounts at their core, which is why this thesis integrates personal and
autobiographical elements. Queer studies benefits and calls for the inclusion of personal
experience as it is intertwined with identity politics and subjective matters at its core, therefore it
cannot advance without the existence of queer individuals and queer experiences. To continue
this reclamation of what can be considered legitimate modes of knowledge, some research in this
thesis has been gathered through conversations with artists, performers, and media that has been
formative to me as a queer individual.
This emphasis on personal experience also applies to the definitions of “queer” and
“queer performance” that I will be using as frameworks for the rest of this paper. The beauty of
the word “queer” stems from the liminal space it occupies that directly opposes the rigid social
structures it rejects. Thus, I borrow from feminist and queer performance art historian and
theorist Amelia Jones’ definition. Her definition asserts that queer “means something that like
opening all identifications and meanings to relational exchanges—acknowledging that the
appearance of ‘being’ is always activated through ‘doing’” adding on that “performances
arguably become queered when actively polluted or perverted by feelings, opening the subjects

2
Lauren Fournier. Autotheory As Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. (Bronx: MIT Press, 2021.), 7.
3
Ibid.

7

[...] to the obvious tug of relational desires, revulsions, and otherwise.”
4
The essence of this
definition is the concept is queer is as queer does. Queer is transformative in the sense that it is
something that has to be activated through presenting a certain way to be perceived by others
through actions, appearances, and so many other nuances. Jones’ definition highlights that queer
is as much as a verb as it is an identity. Therefore, queerness lends itself easily to the activating
properties of performance, as performance breaks down the status quo of social contexts and
encourages subjects (both performers and viewers) to examine their relational positions. As
Jones points out, a performance becomes queer when it begins to deal with feelings, which are
deeply rooted in personal and subjective experiences. This cycle of activated connection is the
essence of queer performance and its transformative nature, and since feelings are so amorphous
in nature, queerness exists in the liminal cracks and crevices that the “straight” world often
overlooks. Instead of denying and repressing feelings and personal experiences, queerness offers
a cathartic relief of allowing oneself to be vulnerable and honest with their inner emotions and
feelings Thus, the fluid and broad nature of queerness rejects rigidity simply by existing in an
uncategorical state that is ruled by the unorthodox reasoning of feelings. To pin down and limit
the definition of queer any further would be to contain something that refuses to be categorized.
Some may argue that this definition is broad, but that is the nature of queer.
`

4
Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: a Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. (New York: Routledge, 2020),
xvi.

8

Chapter One: A Historical Revue of Wigs
The practical use of wigs in performance is not a contemporary breakthrough, as there are
many cultures and time periods in which performers have incorporated wigs into theatrical,
ritualistic and performative practices. This section aims to explore the historical uses of wigs,
and the contexts in which they were utilized to examine their function and transformative
properties. This is in no way a comprehensive survey of the use of wigs throughout history, but
rather an overview of different cultures and their use and thoughts on wigs to provide a better
perspective on the use of these accessories before contemporary practices and performance
pieces.
Masks for Masks: Ancient Greece and the Queerification of Masks
Ancient Greek thinking about performance and theatrics has been rooted in and linked to
the phenomenon of catharsis. As scholar Stefan Meisiek points out when discussing Aristotle’s
view on catharsis and the role of theater, “according to Aristotle, theatre leads to release from
negative affect, whereby the eliciting of emotions is seen as a means of purifying related bad
memories” further explaining how this process of catharsis “is supposed to arouse feelings
connected with recognized problems by presenting these on the stage, thus allowing the audience
to relive them passively and, because of their non-real presentation as drama, also to resolve
them.”
5
Applying my definition of queer to Aristotle’s thought process behind the cathartic
nature of performance, it is clear that performance has a historical precedent of being queer. It is
evident that this art practice has historically been intertwined with dealing with emotions and
relationality that had real power and impacts on the viewer.

5
Stefan Meisiek, “Which Catharsis Do They Mean? Aristotle, Moreno, Boal and Organization Theatre,” in
Organization studies, (London: SAGE Publications: 2004), 797.

9

Continuing with the historical contexts of Greek drama and philosophy surrounding
performance, the use of wigs in Ancient Greek theater was rooted in visual cues that were easily
translatable for the audience. As Classics scholar C. W. Marshall points out, masks that the
Greeks used can be better understood as “headpieces” since they served a dual purpose of mask
and wig, covering the entire head except for the eyes and mouth.
6
An illustration of one of these
masks can be seen in Figure 1. Marshall continues to explain how all of the actors during these
times would have been biologically male, which means some of them would have been playing
roles of another gender. Thus, masks were used as signifiers for the traits of “sex and gender” as
Marshall explains:
An actor wore a white mask to play a woman, a darker mask to play a
man. This reflected, or rather exaggerated, the normal conditions of
ancient life, in which men were generally sunburnt because they spent so
much time out-of-doors whereas women lived mainly indoors. Normally a
male mask would also have a beard.
7

With this in mind, there is no denying that the Greeks used these masks in order to transform
their physical vessels to better match the persona they were portraying. These masks were some
of the only visual aids that altered how the characters were perceived by the entire audience,
which allowed female characters to be alive on stage even though the performer and the audience
were aware that all of the actors were male. This was a particularly important tool to use, as
women were not allowed a platform in this patriarchal society. Although this is not an explicitly
queer practice, especially considering the social contexts at the time, the suspension of gendered

6
C. W. Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” in Greece and Rome 46, no. 2, (Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 188.
7
Ibid., 190

10

reality throughout the entirety of the performance is something worth noting. Not only were
these ancient Greek productions queer in their cathartic nature of encouraging the viewer to
purge their own emotions and deal with emotional nuances, but they were also queer in the sense
that they bent the rules of perceived gender and activated this gender flipping through
performance and the use of masks/wigs.
To Wig, or Not to Wig: Wigs and Shakespeare
The final stop in this historical survey of different performative wig accessories
throughout history is in England during the times of Shakespeare’s theatrical debuts. In fact, the
word “wig” is derived from Shakespeare himself.
8
The play The Two Gentlemen of Verona
includes an excerpt where the character Julia is passionately discussing her feelings towards
another woman fighting for the heart of the same man when she exclaims “Her hair is auburn,
mine is perfect yellow: If that be all the difference in his love, I'll get me such a colour'd
periwig.”
9
The word “periwig” was shortened to “wig” and became absorbed into the larger
English lexicon to mean synthetic hair. Even analyzing this quote, one can gather the
transformative properties of a wig that changes the way one is viewed, in this case being utilized
to appear more desirable to a man’s taste. Although it was a line in a play, this usage of the word
pointing to the wig as a tool of self performance once again demonstrates the power that wigs
have in regards to altering identity, in this case through physicality.
Shakespeare not only coined the term “wig” in one of his plays, but the productions of his
works also utilized these accessories to help some of the actors morph into their roles. Similar to
the situation in ancient Greece, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when

8
Yakeen Hafouda and Paul Yesudian, “Unraveling the Locks of Wigs: A Historical Analysis,” in International
journal of trichology 11, no. 4 (Mumbai: Wolters Kluwer India Pvt. Ltd, 2019), 177.
9
William Shakespeare and Roger Warren, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 167.

11

Shakespeare was writing his plays, women were not allowed to act or perform on stage, therefore
male actors (often young boys) were tasked with playing female roles.
10
This cross-dressing was
supplemented by wardrobe and accessories to provide visual cues for the audience to follow,
including wigs that were styled to reflect the background and identity of the character they were
portraying.
11
An example of this gender bending technique used in a Shakespeare play at the
time can be seen in Figure 2. As with the cathartic vision for theater in ancient Greece,
Shakespeare’s plays also utilized the manipulation of pathos to elicit responses from the
audience, especially considering his plays could be categorized as farcical comedies or intense
dramas/tragedies.
12
In addition, Shakespeare actually used cross-dressing in some of his plays,
most notably Twelfth Night, which features a female character explicitly cross-dressing as a male
to survive in a foreign land, a plot that leads to a queer-allusive subtext once she begins to
become attracted to another female as her male persona.
13
Considering the design, text, and
intent of Shakespeare’s productions, one finds that they are filled to the brim with what today we
would recognize as underlying queer rhetoric. Not only do they feature overt cross-dressing with
the actors utilizing wigs to swap their performed gender, but they also utilize storytelling
conventions that show the fragility of gender and how much of it is based on perception and the
relationships around us. These tools were utilized to queer the performance as these productions

10
Lorna Koski, “Cross-Dressing With Shakespeare,” in WWD 206, no. 132 (Los Angeles: Penske Business Media,
LLC, 2013), 10.
11
Jean E Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” in The world
Shakespeare 39, no. 4 (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988): 420.
12
During my undergraduate studies I took many Text Studies classes with Theater Professor Sharon Carnicke.
Through her discussions and explorations of the text, I was able to gather this information of Shakespeare’s works
and how they tried to capture the same mimetic cathartic qualities of Ancient Greek comedies and tragedies. Funnily
enough, when we read Shakespeare out loud during class I would often be assigned to read for female roles and wish
a wig would have been at my disposal to truly physicalize the characters.
13
Tamara Powell and Sim Shattuck, “Looking for Liberation and Lesbians in Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressing
Comedies,” in The Upstart crow 24 (Clemson: Clemson University, Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing,
2004), 5.

12

told stories that dealt with human emotions, shaping the audience’s perception of these pieces to
be rooted in the emotional nature of the human condition.
Let Them Wear Wigs!: The Performative Nature of Wigs in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Piggybacking off the signifying and transformative elements of wigs in ancient Greece,
people in eighteenth-century Europe (mainly France and England) utilized wigs as theatrical
tools for everyday life. Even though these were not explicit performances or overt theatrical
productions, the performative elements and intentions of their usage in this time period should be
acknowledged as a kind of performance. In Eighteenth-Century Europe, wigs were utilized to
create the “It-Effect” as it “provides a locally crowning self-assertion of the wearer and from
time to time a cruz in fashion history.”
14
As eighteenth-century scholars Margaret K. Powell and
Joseph Roach point out, “performance encompasses conscious repetition and occasional revision
or previous public behaviors, as in formal or informal social encounters, and precise enactments
of scripted scenarios, as in theatrical representation or obligatory ritual.”
15
Performance not only
exists when it is produced in a theater, but is practiced every day when navigating how we
present ourselves as individuals to others. This includes the visual signifiers we utilize, and
although wigs are out of fashion for contemporary users, in the eighteenth century wigs were
emblems rich with information regarding identity. In fact, eighteenth-century English hairdresser
and writer James Stewart offered his own musings about the wig trends that were taking over
Europe at the time:
As the perukes [archaic word for wig] became more common, their shape
and forms altered. Hence we hear of the clerical, the physical, and the

14
Joseph Roach. “Hair,” in It. (University of Michigan Press, 2007), 117.
15
Margaret K. Powell and Joseph R Roach, “Big Hair,” in Eighteenth-century studies 38, no. 1 (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 84.

13

huge tie peruke for the man of the law, the brigadier, or the major for the
army and navy [...] The merchant, the man of business and of letters, were
distinguished by the grave full bottom, or more moderate tie, neatly curled
[...] All conditions of men were distinguished by the cut of the wig, and
none more so than the coachman, who wore his, as there does some to this
day, in imitation of the cured hair of a waterdog.
16

With all of these different hair styles that indicated different occupations and class styles, there
was a sense of pride and outward performance that wigs in this context provided. Just like in
ancient Greece, these wigs were utilized to project a role that was meant to make an element of
identity easy to perceive. In particular, the French nobility had the most opulent and extravagant
of wigs to demonstrate their class and position in society.
17
One of these royal wigs can be seen
in Figure 3, in all of its gaudy glory.
With these feelings of pride, class, and opulence that these wigs are able to convey, there
is once again a queer element to their functions. Like the Greeks, these wigs dealt with abstract
feelings of class and positionality within society at large without having to discuss them overtly.
It gave members of society an avenue to express their own identity in relation to the social
contexts around them. This activation also shows the transformative nature of wigs, as one piece
of synthetic hair could turn a layman into a member of nobility simply by optics alone. It is
crystal clear that wigs were used in this European context as tools activated by daily ritual and

16
James Stewart, Plocacosmos: Or the Whole Art of Hair Dressing; Wherein Is Contained, Ample Rules for
the Young Artizan, More Particularly for Ladies Women, Valets, etc. etc. as Well as Directions for Persons to
Dress Their Own Hair; Also Ample and Wholesome Rules to Preserve the Hair. The Hair Completely
Analyzed, as to Its Growth, Nature, Colour, &c. and All and Every Article Used in the Hair, on the Head,
Face, &c. as, False Hair, Perfumery, Cosmetics, &c. Clearly Analyzed and Examined; with a History of the H.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online. London: printed for the author, No. 12, Old Broad-Street; and sold by
all the booksellers in town and country, 1782.
17
Margaret K. Powell. and Joseph R Roach, “Big Hair,” in Eighteenth-century studies 38, no. 1 (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 2004), 81

14

performance to show place and class, another historical example that displays the queer
transformative properties of wigs.
Goodbye Yellow Wig Road
Throughout all three of the historical contexts discussed in this section, the case for queer
uses of wigs in performance is abundantly solidified. There is no arguing that these tools were
directly linked with performance, a term that is applicable to both staged productions and
interactions in everyday life. With this historical context in mind, there is a clear foundation that
lays down multiple ways and functions of wigs in different societies. In the next section, I will
explore how contemporary uses of wigs have continued to evolve to continue to serve as tools in
queer performance spheres.

15

Chapter Two: The Dragging of the Wigs
To not mention the art of drag in a project about wigs and queer performance would be
an egregious oversight. To that end, this section’s main focus will be on detailing the evolution
of drag as an artform in the contemporary US, especially in relation to how wigs and head
accessories have been cemented as tried and true tools in the repertoire for many a queen.
18

Although drag performance has a rich history that spans decades and cultures, for the purpose of
contextualizing this project in contemporary performance I will be focusing on major drag
movements from the latter half of the twentieth century onward and solely in the context of the
US. Throughout these movements we will see the different climates in which drag existed, as
well as how wigs were a common denominator across many of these contexts. Towards the end
of the section, I will also be diving deeper into a case study of performance and drag artist Jack
Smith.
She’s Beauty, She’s Grace: The Pageant World of Drag Queens
One of my first exposures to the American contemporary drag history was through the
documentary The Queen directed by Frank Simon and released in 1967; this film detailed the
underbelly of the drag pageant world. The film chronicles and takes a behind the scenes
documentary approach in observing a drag pageant or drag ball. Drag balls are akin to
traditional beauty pageants, except the contestants are all drag queens and/or transgender
individuals. The movie is a beautiful antithesis to the Miss America pageants I would always
watch with my sisters; in The Queen, the typical pageant “girls” were replaced by drag queens.
An interesting detail that the film covers extensively is the fact that these events were mainly

18
My first time at a drag bar one of the queens began to chat with the table I was sitting at. Someone asked her if
she was wearing a wig or if it was her natural hair. She responded with “If it’s natural, it’s not drag.” I am not too
sure how much I agree with her point of view, but it sure was a glamorous response.

16

organized and run by drag queens, which created a safe space since homosexual relationships
and cross-dressing were still illegal in the New York (where the film takes place). One account
from a reporter who covered a restored version of this film noted that the drag pageants in this
film were “‘conventions for drag queens, occasions where the social and the professional
overlap” as there was a queer undercurrent of behind the glitz and canned answers the queens
had prepared.
19

One of the most powerful things about this film is the use of dressing rooms as
backdrops, demonstrating the process of these queens transforming into their female personas.
As the queens talk about their own experiences and their opinions on pageant related answers,
the ritualistic activation of this queer performance style is casually being demonstrated as seen in
Figure 4. There is no denying that wigs were a necessity for drag queens in the pageant circuit at
this time, especially because many queens wished to achieve the illusion of presenting as a
female (both in realistic and hyperbolic sense). Through mimicry and exaggeration, these queens
wanted to achieve what real beauty queens were able to do, and these drag queens did it with
their own queer sensibilities. It is also important to note that these pageant spaces were often
dominated by white heterosexual male drag performers, at a time when Black women were not
allowed to enter the Miss America pageant. Even queer pageants like these often excluded
intersectional queer of color voices, as Crystal LaBeija (who is Afro-Latina) expresses in her
vehement complaint the last few minutes of the film when she protests “I have a RIGHT to show
my color, darling.”
20
After losing this pageant, Crystal Labeija starter her House of Labeija due
to anti-Blackness she faced in the pageant world.

19
Richard Brody, “‘The Queen’: The Documentary That Went Behind the Scenes of a Drag Pageant Years Before
‘Paris Is Burning,’” The New Yorker, 2019.
20
Miss LaBeija’s impassioned monologue at the end of this film is something that has been seared in my brain. As a
queer person of color, there is something about this speech that resonated with me as I have faced racist attitudes

17

Tens, Tens, Tens Across the Board!: Ball Culture and Colored Queer Resistance
While talking to one of my sisters about this project and section on ballroom culture, she
reminded me that this counterculture was something I was interested in at a young age. My
sisters and I are huge Madonna fans, and at one point I contemplated asking my dentist to get a
dental procedure so that I could have a gap in my teeth just like the singer. Whenever we were
alone at the house Madonna was somewhere singing in the distance; whether it was Lucky Star,
Holiday, or Express Yourself, I had those lyrics on lock. Usually, my sisters would tell me the
meanings of the songs and what the lyrics meant, but the one song that they could never truly
explain was Vogue. It wasn’t because they were ignorant or homophobic, but because they didn’t
really know what it meant either. I think that our confusion was fitting. We may have never
understood what voguing was when our one point of reference was a song by a singer who
appropriated a culture she did not belong to.
21
Still, that didn’t stop us from watching the music
video and trying to mimic the intricate hand movements, which is arguably the earliest instance
of me engaging in queer performance without even knowing it.
In large, urban metropolitan areas in the United States during the late twentieth century,
members of the queer community who were people of color were intersectionally marginalized
as they were rejected on the basis of their queerness (from outside of the queer community) and
for their race (from inside of the queer community).
22
With these oppressive coming in from
multiple angles, queers of color created a counterculture known as “ballroom culture” which was
comprised of two main aspects, “flamboyant competitive balls” and “the anchoring family-like

from within the queer community. I strongly urge everyone to give this film a watch and hear how her words still
ring true decades later.
21
While I still listen to Madonna, I do have my opinions on the way she treated her background dancers and
claimed an art form that did not belong to her.
22
Marlon Murtha Bailey, “The Labor of Diaspora: Ballroom Culture and the Making of a Black Queer
Community,” PhD Diss. (University of California, Berkeley: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005), 34.

18

structures, called houses, which mount these performance events.”
23
There are two key concepts
to unpack with this description. For one, the flamboyant and competitive nature of the balls
indicates that they can best be described as competitive fashion shows, which is clear as they are
documented in the 1991 documentary Paris is Burning directed by Jennie Livingston.
24
There
would typically be different categories in which ball attendees could compete, such as
“Executive Realness,” where they would compete to see who could dress up as the most passing
(convincing) version of business executives crossed with the style of 1980’s gaudiness, or
“Eleganza Extravaganza,” where the goal was to look as opulent and luxurious as one could.
25
A
photo of one of these looks can be seen in Figure 5. Walking these categories exemplifies the
way in which queer performance lends itself to transformational qualities. These performers
would use garments, wigs, and attitude to transform themselves into different personas, imagined
realities of who they could be if not for the marginalizing factors that worked against them. Wigs
themselves became a part of the battle and drama of ballroom vogue-offs and category
presentations, transforming into weapons of opulence and fierceness. Not only were the
performances queer because of the varying queer identities of the performers, but because these
performances dealt so deeply with feelings of longing, desire, and love. Ballroom gave these
queer performers an avenue to express themselves freely without repercussion, and without the
fear of being judged or harassed in the outside world.
Other key elements to dissect from ballroom culture are the concepts of families and
houses. These were terms that were coined to describe members of ballroom culture who banded
together and created a family-like unit, oftentimes having a matriarchal/patriarchal figure who

23
Ibid., 1
24
Paris is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston (Miramax Home Entertainment, 1990)
25
Marlon Murtha Bailey, “The Labor of Diaspora: Ballroom Culture and the Making of a Black Queer
Community,” PhD Diss. (University of California, Berkeley: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005), 36.

19

took in newcomers of the community and showed them the ropes.
26
These seasoned performers
would provide a number of resources to their family, most notably how to prepare themselves
and utilize tools such as fashion, makeup, and wigs to win the different categories and bring
more accolades to their house/family. I think it is important to highlight this detail because it
shows the dissemination of these transformational qualities and techniques through generations
of queer performers on this scene.
In sum, the modes of usage and application of wigs on the ballroom were based on sacred
knowledges and rituals that these queer performers passed down with love in order to ensure that
their “descendants” would be able to continue performing and transforming to express the most
“authentic” versions of themselves. The importance of family and maintaining styles and rituals
demonstrate the deep queer roots of the drag ball and voguing communities, as there is a deep
emphasis on relationality and care within a culture that was truly shaped by feelings and
emotions.
The Rhetoric of Opulence: Unpacking Fabulousness and What it Conveys
Contemporary drag performers have continued to utilize wigs in grand ways during their
performances and shows. A key recent example would be Symone’s wig from the finale lip sync
performance in the thirteenth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2021). As an avid watcher of the
show, I have seen many extravagant wigs, with the concept of a wig reveal (one wig being pulled
back to reveal another wig or gag underneath) being popularized in the genre.
27
However,
Symone’s finale wig was a beautiful braided updo that transformed into a moving carousel of

26
Paris is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston (Miramax Home Entertainment, 1990)

27
I would like to give credit to Roxxy Andrews for popularizing the concept of a wig reveal during a lipsync
(specifically for the show) on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5. Thank you so much for your impact.

20

parades. This wig can be seen in Figure 6 and is a moving example of Black excellence that won
her the crown.
28

It is important to recognize that much of mainstream contemporary drag culture is
derived from ballroom culture, as seen by the reading challenge that pops up every season of
RuPaul’s Drag Race and runway categories on the show such as “Eleganza Extravaganza.” As
described in the previous section, ballroom culture is heavily comprised of queer people of color,
especially Black and brown individuals. Thus, there is no denying the dissemination and
borrowing of the Black imaginary in contemporary drag performances. In fact, Black queer
scholar madison moore has dived into the meaning of what it means to be fabulous.
29
moore
explains what the rhetoric of “fabulousness” in the following passage:
When you are brown, queer, and marginalized, fabulousness is not simply
about being beautiful and opulent but about seizing visual space on your
own terms as an act of resistance, right now and in real time, even if that
visibility is risky business. If no one gives you the space you need to
thrive, make your own.
30

With this quote in mind, I argue that contemporary drag queens (especially Black queens) utilize
fabulousness as a transformative performance based on the urgent reclamation of how their
gender and identities are perceived/performed. As we saw in Symone’s finale look, wigs are a
huge part of this reclamation, as hair is an extension of our physicality and exemplifies how
gender can be constructed in lavish and whimsical ways. Performance physicalizes what

28
Spoiler alert.
29
Huge acknowledgement to madison moore, who sits on my thesis committee and urged me to pursue this topic
even when I thought it was not academic or professional. You have pushed me to truly explore the topics that former
Professors and academics have told me I should stay away from.
30
madison moore, Fabulous : the Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.), 186.

21

marginalized groups are told they cannot be, and wigs are an essential part of this undeniable
manifestation of resistance.
In fact, psychoanalyst and writer Carly Inkpen dissects the term fabulousness when they
assert, “[t]he vitalizing force of fabulousness comes not from society’s validation and
affirmation,” adding that one of the sources is “from its over-the-top, joyful sense of using
fashion for self-creation [...] It comes from enthusiastically making oneself in defiance of social
norms” adding on that another force of fabulousness derives from “vitalizing in its political
urgency” constructing a world in which these marginalized identities can safely exist.
31

Drag queens quite literally utilize wigs amongst other tools to create these fantasies, and to
weaponize the fragility of gender and sexuality. By doing drag and activating this sense of
fabulousness, they expand any predisposed gender norms and truly create their own rules in all
of their irreverent and gaudy glory. By activating tools such as wigs, these contemporary
performers not only are queer in the sense that they flip gender, but queer in the sense that they
tap into a pure sense of joy and imagination that is often ignored. In doing so, these performers
create and solidify a sense of queer community, where their visions of expression can be
materialized and validated.
Drag of the Abject: Exploring Jack Smith and Maria Montez
This whole section has been devoted to drag queen culture through the lens of pageants,
ballroom, and the fabulousness that exists in those worlds. However, some queer performance
artists utilized drag and its transformative capabilities in a different context. One form of drag is
not more valid than the other, but the next portion of this section is written to provide a wider

31
Carly Inkpen, “Fabulousness - What the Doctor Ordered: Exploring the Intrapsychic Significance and Social
Meanings of Fashion.” in Psychoanalytic social work 27, no. 1 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 99.

22

range of perspective and viewpoints by focusing on the influences and works of Jack Smith,
specifically looking at how he utilized wigs and drag.
Smith was a queer artist active in New York who had many cinematic, theatrical and
performative art pieces in the 1960s, up until his death in 1987. His practice was deeply rooted in
rejecting any norms that queer artists were subjected to at the time. As Amelia Jones notes, his
late night theater events “proclaimed his identity plainly and forthrightly as a gay male avatar of
camp” adding on that he “exposed himself in his flaming queerness as a means of confronting
the hypocrisies of the art world and of American capitalism.”
32
In fact, according to British
scholar Dominic Johnson, the 1960’s were an odd time for queer artists as “throughout the
1960s, the artistic avant-garde would suppress its sexuality in favour of formalist abstraction's
evacuation of subjectivity, and along with this the sexualities of its protagonists” and as these
avant-garde styles became more mainstream it began to “repres[s] its queerness” and “so too did
homosexuals begin to repress and overcome their apparent avant-garde-ness, co-opting its
radicality in favour of the bourgeois consumerism of the emerging gay market.”
33
In an interview
expressing his frustrations with these movements, Smith was recorded saying “‘I took my
program to a gay theatre ‘and [the promoter] couldn’t understand how it was gay [...] If I wasn’t
discussing exactly how many inches was my first lollipop then it wouldn’t be anything they’d be
interested in.”
34

It is clear that Smith was quite dissatisfied with the commodification and
commercialization of queer culture, and as the researchers pointed out he turned to camp.

32
Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: a Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. (New York: Routledge, 2020),
141.
33
Dominic Johnson, “The Wound Kept Open: Jack Smith, Queer Performance and Cultural Failure,” in Women &
performance 17, no. 1 (Routledge, 2007), 6.
34
Sylvère Lotringer, “Uncle Fishook and the Sacred Baby Poo Poo of Art (interview with Jack Smith),” (Hoberman
and Leffingwell, 1978), 112.

23

Personally, I would argue that camp has casually been tossed into mainstream lexicon as an
abstract term that is not necessarily anchored down to any specific meaning other than to mean
“queer.”
35
Therefore, I would like to do a brief historical review of the word and some of the
discourse around it, specifically to how it has been used by Smith. The term “camp” was defined
by American essayist and philosopher, Susan Sontag after she noticed that a lot of forms of
media in the 1960’s were following the same pattern revolving around the “love of the unnatural:
of artifice and exaggeration” making something so tasteless that it becomes tasteful, á la Valley
of the Dolls or Mommie Dearest.
36
Sontag also notes that camp is “something of a Private code, a
badge of identity” between members of the same community, most notably the homosexual
community.
37
Thus, camp is a taste and sensibility as much as it is an aesthetic philosophy since
those who love it actively choose to consume camp and participate in it.
The notion of camp is intrinsically linked to Smith’s obsession with the Old Hollywood
actress Maria Montez. As theater and drama academic Rachel Joseph points out, “Smith
embraced Maria Montez as his muse in spite of (or maybe because of) the perception of her as
being an untalented film actress who was truly Ridiculous in her badness.”
38
Through her
performance in films, Montez essentially showed Smith that there could be beauty in what
standards deject as awful, a cornerstone philosophy in the beauty of camp. However, Smith did
not just admire these qualities in Montez, but used them as inspiration. Specifically, “Montez
clearly epitomizes Smith’s anti-aesthetic, because by failing to act competently, she allows for

35
I am fascinated by the phenomenon of camp as a sensibility and aesthetic phenomenon, and have incorporated
thee study of it into many of my performances and academic papers. However, I feel that after the 2019 Met Ball
Gala, the term’s use has been oversaturated in public dialogue and not quite understood by many people who use it.
I fear the term has lost its power, but am hopeful for its reclamation.
36
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,’” in Partisan Review 31.4, 515. 1964, 8.
37
Ibid, 8
38
Rachel Joseph, “Glittering Junk: Jack Smith And The Vast Landfill Of Identity,” in The Journal of American
drama and theatre 25, no. 2 (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2013), 78.

24

something ‘genuine’ to be caught on film” thus inspiring Smith to utilize performance as a
means “to define a politics: one that is not impeded by the intrusion of nonsense, eccentricity and
failure. His obliqueness is therefore a screen for the moments the excess of his mad feigning
slips, exposing his own fragility and the destitution of the cultural structure that conditions it.”
39

In Smith’s essay regarding Montez, he notes that “If you think you are invalid you may be the
person who ridicules Montez movies. To admit of Maria Montez validities would be to turn on to
moldiness. Glamorous Rapture, schizophrenia delight, hopeless naivete, and glittering
technicolor trash!”
40
Montez inspired Smith to create queer art out of the crevices of what others
called trash, especially in regards to what it meant to be a “good” performer.
Unlike pageants or ballroom culture that aimed to be luxurious, opulent, and fabulous,
Smith opted to use performance to be as tasteless as he could to reject any notion that queer had
to be polished. For Smith, this approach to queerness that surrounded itself in mess and trash
made it all the more real. In most of his works, Smith was performative and transformative in
nature as he would mold into a different persona or character, either for the stage or the camera,
often using actual trash and discarded items to create the sets and costumes for his works.
41
Wigs
and head accessories were used quite frequently in these pieces as well, as seen in Figure 7. The
most obvious use of wigs and drag in Smith’s work is the filmed performance of The First
Memoirs of Maria Montez which stars Smith and a drag artist named Mario Montez, so named
by smith, who portrays Maria Montez in drag.
42
Mario Montez was a notable underground film

39
Dominic Johnson, “The Wound Kept Open: Jack Smith, Queer Performance and Cultural Failure,” in Women &
performance 17, no. 1 (Routledge, 2007), 5.
40
Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The
Writings of Jack Smith, edited by J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell. (The Plaster Foundation, Inc., 1997), 26.
41
Rachel Joseph, “Glittering Junk: Jack Smith And The Vast Landfill Of Identity,” in The Journal of American
drama and theatre 25, no. 2 (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2013), 80.
42
Silent Shadows on Cinemaroc Island: 56 Ludlow Street 1962-1964, directed by Jack Smith (1999).

25

star at the time, starring in many of Warhol’s films and often wearing a black wig (as seen in this
film as Mario wears a wig in the style of Maria Montez).
43
This film is a cacophony of images,
piles of junk, erratic hand movements, canned line deliveries, all centered around the prolific
figure of Maria Montez. As scholar Rachel Joseph asserts, this film is centered around “an
analysis based upon the limits of classification and, most importantly, the materiality of the
performance itself” as the piece “performs the impossibility of identity and the persistence of all
the literal stuff that is heard but unseen in the recording.”
44
It is clear that Smith uses the
transformative nature of drag and wigs in his pieces to try and capture the ephemeral nature of
performance, and identity as a whole. In a time where gay art was becoming more sanitized,
Smith’s works focused on showing the underbelly of queer identity and themes, the constant
restlessness of identities that are in flux and constantly evolving.
Smith activates his queer ennui through his performances and accessories, a deep
insecurity about trying to feel secure in an identity that is liminal. Smith utilizes camp, drag and
wigs to literally transform into different iterations of identity using pieces of materiality that have
been discarded as trash. By constantly reinventing himself through performance, Smith makes
deep commentary on how to try and make sense of pieces of our identity that ultimately might be
discarded just like the materials he activates. Smith’s fascination with Montez and camp as an
aesthetic brings more power to his artistic thesis of trying to make something meaningful and
beautiful out of what others consider invaluable. Smith understands that temporality is something
all items and identities are victims to, and through performance and transformative tools such as

43
Douglas Martin, “Mario Montez, a Warhol Glamour Avatar, Dies at 78,” The New York Times, 2013.
44
Rachel Joseph, “Glittering Junk: Jack Smith And The Vast Landfill Of Identity,” in The Journal of American
drama and theatre 25, no. 2 (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2013), 82.

26

wigs, was able to make poignant arguments about the queer nature of the world and what we
consider beautiful.
The Snatching of the Wig
In this section it is quite clear that one of the most prominent uses of wigs and its powers
are linked to drag in some sense. Through pageants, balls, fabulousness, camp, and the
grotesque, there is no right or wrong way to utilize wigs in drag and queer performance. Wigs
are applicable to so many artists and practices because of their malleability, they become
extensions of the performance and beautiful supplements of what these artists want to convey. In
regard to drag and this section, it is clear that the gender bending qualities of wigs make them
powerful weapons to make arguments and participate in rhetoric regarding gender, sexuality,
queerness, and queerness as a whole. This final section will closely examine two more case
studies of twenty-first century contemporary artist and their performances, and how wigs were
utilized in their specific pieces.

27

Chapter 3: The Wigs That Keep on Giving
Wigs and head accessories continue to infiltrate the closets and performances of
contemporary queer performance artists. Drag is a prime example of how wigs are used in this
medium, but there are also artists who use wigs who would not classify their works as drag. Even
though drag is the most recognizable (and arguably the most mainstream) avenue of queer
performance, wigs transcend the categorization of one medium and it is important to recognize
how they continue to be activated in different ways and venues. This section aims to highlight
two of these artists and their works, specifically focusing on their artistic practices and
intentions.
Off with Their Wigs!
The first artist this section will focus on the contemporary performance artist Ron Athey,
and his 2019-2021 piece Acephalous Monster.
45
Athey often uses the power of transformation to
guide his works, as his practice is defined as follows by performance scholar Amelia Jones:
“shaping his body across genders, enacting himself as macho or, contrastingly, as driven by
‘queenie’ and campy aesthetics, Athey created an array of phantasmagorical characters that in
turn, magnify his larger-than-life performance (and life) persona.”
46
It is clear that the liminality
of identity and perception is something that guides Athey’s practice, and there are certain
physical tools and elements that Athey takes advantage of to support his act of shapeshifting. In
fact, Jones notes that “fashion and body art (including tattoos, piercing, haircuts) have been
central to Athey’s performance and everyday self-preservation since his teens-- modes of self-

45
This piece was performed at numerous venues, including “Performance Space” in New York (November 14-17,
2018) and “Redcat” in Los Angeles (August 26-29, 2021).
46
Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell, “General Checklist,” Queer Communion: Ron Athey, ed. Amelia Jones and
Andy Campbell (Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 2020), 375.

28

determination and empowerment.”
47
By doing so, Athey is able to emphasize the fragility of
gender by playing with the signifiers that are utilized to uphold gender norms.
His piece Acephalous Monster is a perfect theatrical embodiment of Athey’s chameleon-
like artistic work. This performance piece features a large portion where, as art historian
Dominic Johnson describes the work, “Athey becomes Louis XVI at his toilet and is
symbolically beheaded (a wax head is split with an axe) before speaking in tongues with only his
guillotined head visible, Beckett-like, through a spot-lit hole.”
48
Here, Johnson is referring to the
film that is playing concurrently with the performance, in which an executioner (played by
Divinity Fudge) splits a cast of Athey’s head with an axe. Athey’s interpretation of the French
king, as Jones argues, “illustrates the Bataillean idea of the ‘acephalous monster’ through
theatrically excessive means” including projections and intricate lighting design and cues.
49

While becoming Louis XVI, Athey performs a ritualistic ceremony putting himself in makeup
and a voluminous and quaffed wig at a decadent vanity fit with a comically oversized powder
puff that he beats his face with. At this vanity, Athey removes the wig from the mannequin after
brushing and preparing it, and places it in his own making sure it is sitting and secure. The wig
looks like it has two horns protruding from the crown of his head, an opulent piece that is
baroque in nature, very in the mode of how the most fashionable men would have worn it in the
late eighteenth century. Through this process, Athey begins to embody the king, his essence is
transformed and another iteration of Athey’s identity through this performance is born with the
wig ceremony. This wig can be seen in Figure 8. Other sections of the performance involve

47
Ibid, 376.
48
Dominic Johnson,“Ron Athey: Acephalous Monster,” Art Monthly, no. 432. (London: Britannia Art Publications,
2019), 34.
49
Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell, “General Checklist,” Queer Communion: Ron Athey, ed. Amelia Jones and
Andy Campbell (Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 2020), 375.

29

other masks, props, and transformations into other personas, but the wig is only present during
the Louis XVI portrayal. Yet, there is a deeper meaning behind the purpose of this
transformation that deals with identity, lavishness, and positions of power. Athey is no longer
someone on the fringe of society, but one of the most prominent members of society that
arguably could have it all. Yet, this opulence is what had him beheaded, an execution that is
reenacted only after Athey puts on this wig and embodies King Louis XIV.
In order to truly understand the purpose of Athey’s use of this wig, it is necessary to dive
into the historical context of the “acephalous monster” that this piece is inspired by. This monster
is an allusion to the French philosopher George Bataille, and the secret society that he created
called Acéphale. This group was short lived and existed leading up to World War II, and French
author and historian Allan Stoekl explains how “the Acéphale group was also outside the
mainstream of political life: subversive yet not intended to lead an organized mass movement,”
going on to explain that “the activities of the group would help stimulate a rebirth of the kind of
social values Bataille had espoused: expenditure, risk, loss, sexuality, death.”
50
When
considering the driving values and concept of this secret society, it becomes more apparent why
a contemporary queer performer would look to this group as inspiration. Even if the original
doctrines and rhetoric are separated by 80 years from Athey’s work, Bataillean themes such as
death, sexuality, and risk are still resonant and themes that most contemporary citizens think
about frequently.
51
As a matter of fact, they could be considered large themes in Athey’s life.
Dominic Johnson describes Athey’s particular struggles as follows: “the collective and

50
Allan Stoekl, “Introduction,” Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xix.
51
While working on this project I went on a trip to Vegas with friends. While inebriated on the strip and throwing
chips at craps tables, I could not help but bug my friends by telling them about this secret organization and how they
would have loved Las Vegas. I’m not sure if I was on to something, but that is a paper for another day.

30

individual crises of the early 1990s – epitomized by Athey’s own struggle to survive in the years
between his own diagnosis as HIV+ in 1986 and the advent of antiretroviral therapies after his
first great works” then “required him to push the limits of aesthetic acceptability.”
52
With this
additional context in mind, it is clear why Athey would turn to this philosophical group as their
themes are resonant and hit close to home with what Athey dealt with as a queer individual who
has a personal relationship to the AIDS epidemic.
By using wigs and other theatrical elements, Athey was able to transform himself into an
imagined personification of a historical figure who was killed by his own citizens, which
supplements the deeply personal themes of this performance. By transforming himself into the
lavish and luxurious embodiment of Louis XVI, who is then beheaded, and using the
philosophical ideas of Bataille and the Acéphale as textual and thematic throughlines throughout
the performance, Athey provides rich commentary regarding dismantling hierarchical positions
of power. In the section that includes Athey wearing the wig and reenacting the execution, there
is a section of projected text that reads “To CELEBRATE the BEHEADING of Louis XIV.”
Athey creates a parallel between Bataille’s Francophone secret society and the queer world he
occupies, as both find reasons to celebrate the literal death of societal power structures that do
not care for the well-being of citizens on the fringe of society. In Athey’s case, showing this
execution is an embodiment of queer rage that he feels living as a queer individual who has dealt
with traumatic experiences. Both show that risk, death, and anger are some of the themes that are
present when living as someone who is pushed to the margins of society. With that risk comes
pain, but there is a deep meaning in being able to express the raw and complex liberation of
living in pure authenticity that Athey is able to theatrically present through this performance.

52
Dominic Johnson,“Ron Athey: Acephalous Monster,” Art Monthly, no. 432. (London: Britannia Art Publications,
2019), 34.

31

Through the death of hierarchical structures come reasons to celebrate, as it provides freedom
and liberation. A headless (but wigged) figure becomes an image for a removal and purge of
oppressive forces. The queerness of this performance is beautifully expressed, and the wig and
the head it lays on become sites of queerness through transformation and their imbued meanings
of queer rage contrasted with lavish opulence.
How’s Your Headpiece?
There is nothing more riveting than watching a distressed woman in an opulent gold
sequined gown and headpiece being chased through a forest by a gaggle of penises. Thankfully,
Nao Bustamante makes this into a reality in her 2014 “filmformance” Silver & Gold.
53

Bustamante has a prolific career in performance art, and activates her body as a vessel and
canvas, supplementing it through actions, props, and costume pieces such as wigs and head
accessories. In fact, renowned performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz writes that
Bustamante’s body is “an affective beacon” that “illuminates a particular predicament around
agency within the social: a feeling queer, a feeling brown, that is both about belonging and the
failure to belong.”
54
Bustamante often uses her identity as a Latina woman as a driving force in
her work, although never in ways that are overt. However, as Muñoz iterates, the active and
transformative elements of her performances allow her to contextualize her body in different
ways through the different relational properties she configures in her different pieces.

53
I have been a reality TV buff since a young child, as my sisters raised me on Flavor of Love (2006) a trashy
satirical iteration of The Bachelor where the suitor is the hypeman Flavor Flav. Some of my favorite reality shows
were Bravo’s original shows, including one called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. When I saw the name Nao
Bustamante as one of the professors at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, it sounded familiar, but I could not
put my finger on it. When I attended one of her talks, she mentioned her time on the show and I remember how she
was my favorite contestant on the short-lived show because there was someone who looked like me with an interest
in performance. Years later I was able to call her a professor of mine. The universe works in strange ways.
54
Jose Esteban Munoz, “The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante And the Sad Beauty of Reparation,” in The Sense
of Brown (New York: Duke University Press, 2020), 58.

32

In Silver & Gold, Bustamante utilizes her body and the transformative properties of a
head accessory in order to personify Maria Montez, the previously discussed muse of Jack
Smith. As stated in the promotional material for this piece, “Silver & Gold combines film, live
performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed ‘filmformance’ in which Ms.
Bustamante evokes the muse of legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s
Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race,
glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen.”
55
The filmed portions of this performance feature a
compelling performance of Bustamante as Montez, and in the technical script for the piece one
of the focal scenes in this performance is given the following description “Character goes
through journey depicting idyllic work, till she finds a magic costume, which, to her horror
bestows upon her a penis. After the Penis chase scene, she enters an altered realm and accepts
this special gift.”
56
Part of the “magic costume” that Bustamante describes is a whimsical and
grand headpiece that accompanies the dress. This headpiece can be seen in Figure 9. The
headpiece is a larger than life gold sequined number that resembles a handlebar as it juts out
horizontally. In the live performance of Silver & Gold, Bustamante blows into a tube of the
headdress expanding it’s height. The scene in which Bustamante puts on the costume and
headpiece is reminiscent of a transformation scene in a fairytale, one that suspends belief and
creates an entirely different persona that the character is consumed by.
When discussing this work, it is useful to keep Bustamante’s vision and practice in mind,
especially in how it relates to Smith, Montez, and the concept of the white gaze. When
discussing the inspiration of this piece, Bustamante says “I thought: What if Jack Smith could
direct Maria Montez? What would he have her do? I saw Maria, the Queen of Technicolor,

55
Nao Bustamante, “Silver and Gold Promotional Material,” provided to the author by the artist.
56
Nao Bustamante, “Silver and Gold Technical Script,” provided to the author by the artist.

33

engaged in idyllic women's work, harvesting at the height of lilac season” going on to explain
how the piece is “honing-in on Smith's interest in Hollywood's obsession with filmic
reproduction of the exotic.”
57
As previously discussed, one of Smith’s fascinations with Montez
that he tried to capture in his work was the concept of camp and being so disingenuous or bad
that it becomes genuine. In the same way, Bustamante explains how this piece “is not about
authenticity, but the beautiful artificial,” further explaining why she employs “high camp and
childlike crude theatrical technique [...] It's not about [you] believing it's real. You need to
believe that my character believes in their own realness.”
58
Just as many of Smith’s works were,
this piece is rooted in its artifice, and tools such as the headpiece are used to illustrate this
suspension of belief in performance. There is a tongue in cheek quality in the piece’s self-
awareness that it is not only an homage to Smith and Montez, but also its astute groundedness in
knowing that these characters are not based in reality, but rather the artificial nature of
performance. Just as Smith saw camp in Montez, Bustamante slaps the camp on thick and uses
larger than life props like the headpiece to comment on how exoticism is portrayed in the media.
Bustamante is no stranger to transforming into larger-than-life characters in her works,
and the strategy of using accessories like wigs and headpieces provides Bustamante a way to
perform herself as different identities or personas she wishes to activate. In relation to this
technique, Bustamante’s practice has been described as focusing on a “persona-style
performance” that “is consistent in all the artist’s work” with each of the personas as “part of a
continuum of characters who feel too much or not enough, whose affective attachments and
associations do not cohere or correspond. They thus signify as people whose affective life and

57
Nao Bustamante, “Silver and Gold Promotional Material,” provided to the author by the artist.
58
Ibid.

34

subsequent comportment do not correspond to normative affective behavior.”
59
Bustamante
shifts into identities that are not considered normal or orthodox in a heteronormative and
eurocentric world. Bustamante’s personas have this unorthodox quality about them, linking to
how, in Muñoz’s terms, her work relates to “brown feelings” and how they are “manifestations
of the ways in which ethnic modes of comportment not only represent anti-normative affect, but
also challenge the ways in which dominant ideology prescribes certain codes of normative
comportment.”
60

In Silver and Gold, Bustamante transforms her brown body that is often subjected to the
white gaze as an artist, to another queer body—that of Montez, who hypothetically had a similar
experience in Hollywood. Although there are key differences in the mediums and contexts in
which Bustamante and Montez developed, they are subjected to the same perception, and
Bustamante arguably leans into the fact that she knows how she is being observed. As Muñoz
describes, “exhibitionism is a mode of comportment that insists on a certain decibel of emotion,
one that like many aspects of Latino culture are considered too loud or unharmonious by
normative ears.”
61
This expressive nature that was deemed over the top was something Smith
cherished in Montez, something that guided his own practice, and in a similar fashion this piece
and Bustamante’s larger repertoire as a whole. While some may call it camp, or an artistic
technique, there is some element of truth in noting that this expressive nature is common for
Latina women, but it is deemed as unnatural by the world around them. As performance scholars
note, “restraint, for a woman of color in a white world, often translates into accepting

59
Jose Esteban Munoz, “The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante And the Sad Beauty of Reparation,” in The
Sense of Brown (New York: Duke University Press, 2020), 48.
60
Jose Esteban Munoz, “The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante And the Sad Beauty of Reparation,” in The
Sense of Brown (New York: Duke University Press, 2020), 49 and 50.
61
Jose Esteban Munoz, “The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante And the Sad Beauty of Reparation,” in The
Sense of Brown (New York: Duke University Press, 2020), 50.

35

subordination whereas the affective expressiveness of women of color (in particular, black and
Latina women) is commonly pathologized as ‘crazy’ and ‘hysterical’-such figures are common
to Bustamante's oeuvre.”
62
Through the use of a whimsical headpiece, Bustamante is able to lean
into these stereotypes by mimicking another figure who was subjected to the same perception.
This piece and its head props allow Bustamante to acknowledge this perception of Latina figures,
and she continues these patterns with a sense of awareness throughout.
In Silver and Gold Bustamante uses transformative elements like the headpiece as a
means to create historic parallels, pay homage, and provide commentary on what it means to be a
Latina contemporary performance artist in today’s society. Just as wigs and head accessories
inspired Smith, so too did they inspire Bustamante in this work that is inspired by his craft. Thus,
the site of the head and its accessory become sites of queering, as they allow Bustamante to
explore the liminal power of transformation and identity, allowing her to personify different
iterations of self. Overall, Bustamante is able to use the wig and headpiece to queer her
performance and add deep layers surrounding the nuance of identity and the artificial properties
of what society has deemed natural.
The Wig Bang
This section looked at two different artists and their approaches to using tools like wigs
and headpieces to accentuate their artistic visions, and in doing so they demonstrate how these
items can be used in completely different ways but still carry on their transformative nature. In
doing so, both of these performance artists were able to queer their performance to discuss topics
such as personal emotions, their place in society, and how those qualities can be impacted when
considering how gender and sexuality impact the way one is perceived, and how they choose to

62
Joshua Chambers-Letson, “The Politics of Failure: Nao Bustamante’s Hero,” TDR 51, no. 3 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2007), 176.

36

express themselves. These two artists exemplify the great work being done by performance
artists today who incorporate wigs in their work to continue to push the boundaries of
transformation and activation in the physical spaces that we occupy. As performance pieces are
deeply rooted in relationality, these performers take advantage of their positions as performers
and members of society in their own way to create live pieces of art that touch on how their
identities impact their views and positions in the world. The use of wigs and headpieces are
activated as queer tools as their transformational properties demonstrate the fragility of identity
and perception. The wigs of tomorrow may look different from those of today, but it looks like
these items are ever never going to lose their liminal lace-front edge.

37

Conclusion
As I look at the box of wigs that collect dust in my closet, the most recent one still stands
out to me. A cheap buy from Amazon, but when I put it on for my last strip with the marching
band, it truly tied my look together. Red hat, red gloves, and a blue pantsuit became a unit once I
put the waxy feeling locks on my head to truly transform into my thrifted interpretation of Violet
Beurugarde from Roald Dahl’s imagination. With my COVID vaccine mask on, I got double
takes from bandmates and my directors as I strutted my stuff keeping a piece of chewed gum
tucked behind my ear. Sitting in the box, it is a bit matted in one of the areas where the gum
caught the wig. I can’t help but giggle when I think about how it got stuck while I was using a
urinal and completely panicked when a very confused trucker did not appreciate my getup in the
gas stop restroom we shared somewhere deep in California’s Inland Empire.
From ancient times to bathrooms that shouldn’t pass health codes, wigs and head
accessories have been utilized for centuries because of their innate power. To see them sitting on
a mannequin is one thing, but there is transformational magic that becomes activated when a wig
is worn. Perhaps that is why they continue to be a staple for queer performances and queer
performers. In its nature, queer evades any sense of concrete definition or labelling, a quality that
makes it so unique and powerful. Wigs and other fashion items allow for presentations of self to
change in the bat of an eye, they permit an existence that is in constant flux. As queer
performance artists have proved time and time again, these plastic messes are more than their
matted nature, they are portals to a queer world of endless transformational possibilities. For that
reason, queer performance artists will continue to wig out and wig on.

38

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Halberstam, Jack Judith, “Losing Hope, Finding Nemo and Dreaming of Alternatives” in
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Johnson, Dominic. “Ron Athey: Acephalous Monster.” Art Monthly, no. 432, 34-35. London:
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Jones, Amelia “General Checklist,” Queer Communion: Ron Athey, ed. Amelia Jones and Andy
Campbell, 336-410. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 2020.

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Joseph, Rachel. “Glittering Junk: Jack Smith And The Vast Landfill Of Identity” in The Journal
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41

An Ancient Greek mask that
portrays a female character and
which features details of braided
hair and other effeminate qualities.
[1st - 2nd century AD.The British
Museum] (fig.1)

42

Louis XIV poses wearing an
extravagant wig. [Rigaud
Hyacinthe, Paris, 1701.] (fig.2)

43

A contemporary staging of Twelfth Night in the
style of classic Shakespeare plays, featuring a
male actor wearing a dress and wig/head piece
portraying the character Olivia. Performed in
2013 in New York City. (fig. 3)

44

A Promotional movie poster for The Queen
(1967) demonstrating the process of a drag
queen getting ready. (fig. 4)

45

Pepper LaBeija (a prominent member of
ballroom culture) walking down the runway in
an extravagant garment and headpiece. New
York City in the 1980s. (fig.5)

46

Symone’s finale lip sync look, with the
moving braided attachments on display.
RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 13 Episode 16,
2021. (fig. 6)

47

A photograph of Jack Smith transformed into one
of his many characters during a photographed
performance. 1958-1962. (fig. 7)

48

A photograph of Ron Athey putting on
makeup and the wig during his Acephalous
Monster performance. (fig. 8)

49

Nao Bustamante wearing the iconic
gold headpiece during a performance of Silver
& Gold. (fig. 9)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Dela Rosa, Diego Genaro (author)

Core Title What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 04/06/2023

Defense Date 04/05/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Drag,drag queen,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance,Performance art,queer performance,queer theory,wigs

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jones, Amelia (committee chair), Bustamante, Nao (committee member), moore, madison (committee member)

Creator Email dgdelaro@usc.edu,diegodelarosa888@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112943579

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