Why drag queen art Is Art? A reflection from Costa Rica

Abstract

The research presented is a reflection on drag queen performances in Costa Rica and its positioning as Art and with it, the people who perform it as artists, after confirming a lack of academic analysis on this matter. Methodologically, it was used the case study method of the Costa Rican artistic collective Psycho Drag´s performance Street Runway (2019), through archival analysis of audiovisual production, photographic images and written text. It was used as well the Chilean artistic collective Yeguas del Apocalipsis as canonic reference. The theoretical-conceptual analysis departs from the proposal of Nathalie Heinich (2015) on the paradigm of contemporary art in dialogue with the reflections of Andrea Giunta´s (2014) criteria to understand contemporary art from Latin America, the reflection of Nicolas Bourriaud (2015) about the metaphor of art as an exform for explaining the historical and political function of artistic creation, the concept of transgression in art and the three types of defenses proposed by Anthony Julius (2002). The generating question and the study developed allows to confirm that drag performance representations, in any of their variants, are part of contemporary art, considering that their dissident political motivation towards gender binarism imposed by the cisgender and heterosexual normative system and the use of artistic resources such as theatricality and performance, transgress social conventions and traditional institutionalized academic art.