葛飛 Samuel Garcia
National Taiwan University, Bachelor's

題目：Layering Illusions: Communicating Hyperfemininity and Queer “Taiwaneseness” through Taiwanese Popular Music and Drag Performance

​

Drag is an art of illusion; it creates an extravagant, exaggerated appearance of gender, whether hyperfemininity, hypermasculinity, or something in the middle. Performers perfect this illusion through makeup, wigs, outfits, padding, etc. Once dragged up, the most common performance is lip-syncing: artists will chose songs they identify with and present an emotionally charged show. By choosing a singer that enhances the drag artist’s gender expression, music complements the illusion the look began. The audience receives a multi-layered illusion of hyperbolized gender, expressed through physical appearance, movement, and musical sound. In Taipei's expanding drag scene, queens often chose Taiwanese pop songs by stars such as A Mei (張惠妹) and Jolin Tsai (蔡依林). These songs are not only utilized to express hyperfemininity, but also queer “Taiwaneseness” by putting mainstream pop music into an LGBTQ+ context. This paper discusses drag performances in Taipei by queens Fei Fain (飛帆) and Feilibing (飛利冰), which use Taiwanese popular music to express both hyperfemininity and cultural disidentifications. This disidentification takes mainstream songs about heteronormative relationships and offers them as identificatory sites for the non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgendered subjects of Taipei’s LGBTQ+ nightlife, queering the original encoded meaning of the song. By using an ethnographic approach including observational fieldwork and interviews with performers and audience members, this project explores Fei Fain’s and Feilibing’s motivations and audience reception of their performances. It analyzes how musical characteristics such as melody, vocal timbre, and instrumentation express gendered qualities that layer onto the drag queens’ performance of femininity. Furthermore, it applies Munoz's theory of disidentification to their musical choices, and how this disidentification queers “Taiwaneseness” by recycling the encoded meaning of Taiwanese popular music.

​

​