Lea Pešec’s doctoral project investigates how US-based drag performers construct and navigate their identities across both online and offline spaces. It asks how drag performers present their identities in these dual contexts, especially at a time when their audiences are broader, more global, and more diverse than ever before due to the expansive reach of digital platforms. While drag has long served as a powerful site for challenging normative ideas of gender and self-presentation, digital media have transformed how performers curate, experiment with, and share their identities. The project examines how in-person performance and digital self-representation intersect to shape fluid, negotiated, and often non-conforming expressions of identity.

Drawing on queer theory, queer methodology, and gender performativity, the study approaches drag as a disruptive practice that resists binary understandings of gender and opens space for fluid modes of identity-making. Methodologically, it combines netnography with visual research methods, including an innovative photo-interview approach in which photographic material is co-created. By bringing together research on gender, queerness, and drag with emerging scholarship on digital cultures, the project highlights how LGBTQIA+ communities use both physical and virtual spaces to broaden possibilities for gender expression and challenge normative structures.

Duration: November 2025  – November 2027

Funding program: DOC Fellowship Programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW)

Supervisor: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Klaus Rieser