Drag Queen Miss Chief Eagle Testickle Indigenizes and Queers the Archive and the Repertoire
7 October 2020
On September 21, 2020 the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Intersections of Gender Signature Area at the University of Alberta hosted the first lecture in the 2020 Feminist Research Speaker Series: Drag Queen Miss Chief Eagle Testickle Indigenizes and Queers the Archive and the Repertoire with Dr. Jean O’Hara (Department of Drama).
This presentation focuses on the performance work of Swampy Cree Two-Spirit multifaceted artist Kent Monkman and his alter ego, the drag queen Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. First created in his paintings, the trickster figure purposefully disrupts the colonizing gaze of white cis landscape painters who long had erased, misrepresented and fetishized the Indigenous peoples of what is now called Canada and the United States.
Dr. Jean O’Hara is an assistant professor in the Department of Drama at the University of Alberta. She directs and teaches theatre and has worked in partnership with Indigenous communities for the past fifteen years, including with Native Earth Performing Arts, the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, and Spiderwoman Theater. Her research interests include the intersectionality of race, class, gender, (dis)ability, and sexuality in performance art and theatre as well as Indigenous theatre and representation. O'Hara is the editor of Two-Spirit Acts: Indigenous Queer Performances.
Read the transcript or Listen to the audio file
2020/21 Feminist Research Speaker Series (FRSS)
This event is brought to you by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Intersections of Gender, University of Alberta. Listen to our other 2020/21 FRSS events:
- Drag Queen Miss Chief Eagle Testickle Indigenizes and Queers the Archive and the Repertoire with Dr. Jean O’Hara
- Routes and Roots: The “New Genetics” of Slavery" with Dr. Temi Odumosu
- Teaching Ethically Queer, Trans, and 2S Topics with Alexandra Marshall, Xavia A. Publius, and Dr. Lana Whiskeyjack