Dr. Jacob Mallinson Bird, the University of Oxford, will be exploring drag culture and the media in this special guest seminar. 

This talk will explore my own experiences within the contemporary drag scene, thinking particularly against the current wave of anti-drag, and anti-trans, rhetoric espoused in the UK and US media. Calls for bans on drag, in some way or another, litter the public consciousness. I will explore the call for a ban on drag from another angle, querying the sanitisation of drag in the mainstream, and explore the possibility of promoting the more viscerally radical performances of artists such as Christeen. Could banning drag save drag?

About the speaker

‘Is this the face of the 21st-century polymath?’: asked i-D magazine in an interview with Dr Jacob Mallinson Bird, the academic, model, pianist and drag queen. Within the worlds of academia, Jacob has held several Lectureships, at The Queen’s and Somerville Colleges in Oxford and the Faculty of Music in Cambridge. His DPhil focussed on lip-syncing in drag performance, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and his research has been published by Sound Studies, Contemporary Music Review, and Riffs with reviews for Popular Music, Dancecult, and Performance Research, and a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity. As a model, Jacob has been featured in Dazed, Vogue, and Another Man, and worked with photographers such as Nick Knight and Tim Walker. Jacob’s drag career, in which he is known under the pseudonym Dinah Lux, has also infiltrated his modelling work, appearing in drag for a Jean Paul Gaultier exclusive with Dazed as well as closing Charles Jeffrey’s London Fashion Week show. Jacob is also an accomplished pianist, having performed recitals in Oxford’s Holywell Music Room, London’s Wilton’s Music Hall, as well as internationally as Dinah: Dinah performed at the 32nd International Festival d’Hyères, with a programme of Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, and Rachmaninov. As a drag queen, Dinah is part of the collectives Sink the Pink and Haute Mess, and also pursues her own solo projects, with a focus on lip-syncing and burlesque.

This is a hybrid event: you can join in person or online. For those who wish to join online, you can join using this link.