• Animal Drag
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Animal Drag

£90.00
£90.00 £90.00
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This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Animal Drag – a critical and conscious performance of animality – through chapters that trot, squawk, slither, and crawl through analyses. Each ch...
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  • 01 September 2026
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Animal Drag asserts that performing animality is a political act, capable of de-stabilising humanism and constructs of othering, especially species. The volume trots across and crawls through human-animal studies, posthumanism, theories of drag and thus queer theories of performance and adornment too, to argue that critical and conscious acts of animality challenge the audience to reconsider societal shapings of the nonhuman and the human-animal divide. Historically, those othered have also been considered nonhuman. In doing so, Animal Drag also squawks with many other “minority” studies that have worked with Critical Animal Studies as part of illuminating problematic binaries, but through a series of single acts that disrupt these through the one performance. Together, it weaves a wider discourse on the social and material semiotics of “doing human”, to hopefully generate a wider web of care.
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Price: £90.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 01 September 2026
ISBN: 9781526184399
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

ART / Performance, Drag culture and performance, ART / Subjects & Themes / Plants & Animals, DESIGN / Textile & Costume, Animals and society, Performance art
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Nicola McCartney is an artist and educator, and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies on the Fashion, Jewellery and Textiles programmes at Central Saint Martins. She also works across Fine Art and for external institutions.

Introduction: The critical and conscious performance of animality – Nicola McCartney

Part I Retrospective Animal Drag
1 Reciprocity in motion, nonhuman and material agencies across contemporary and historical contact zones – Donatella Barbieri and Denise Ackerl
2 Journey to the end of the night: Abjection, narcissism and Animal Drag in Boldini’s portraits of Luisa Casati – Penelope Wickson

Part II Contemporary critiques
3 Mimetic Animal Drag as Ecological Crisis Ritual: Hanna Tuulikki’s Deer Dancer (2019) – Zaynah Akeel
4 Tail envy: Rethinking psychoanalytic models of desire through Marianna Simnett’s The Severed Tail (2022) – Elisabetta Garletti

Part III Power in playing
5 Rhinos, raccoons, and salmon: The feminist-queer theatre creation of Animacy Theatre Collective – Alexandra Simpson and Morgan Brie Johnson
6 Love, lipstick and liberation: Artistic activism as a drag cow – Daniel Hellman and Soya the Cow
7 Animalesque drag: Ontopolitics of intensity in Andrea Palašti’s Fitness for Unlikely Species (2022–) – Andrija Filipovic

Part IV Dressing up and stripping down
8 Unbridled: Dragging nudity in Ann Oren’s Piaffe (2022) – Killian O’Dwyer
9 Myasthenia Gravis and Madame Web: Weaving my supercrip disease, spiders and popular culture – Nicola McCartney