My dissertation explores the embodiment and performance of various forms of femininity by assigned male at birth, or male/men/masculine of center identified, individuals that have appeared both onstage and in everyday life during the 20th century in the United States. The descriptor “femme performance” indexes a broad spectrum of attitudes, embodiments, and identities of the feminine that may take place onstage, in a nightclub, on the street, or even in the privacy of someone’s home, enacted by individuals in whom femininity should supposedly not reside. To account for such a range of identities and performances, my dissertation curates and mines a varied set of case studies. Plays such as Mae West’s The Drag, Guillermo Reyes’ Deporting the Divas, and Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country; solo performances by Joe Goode and Eddie Izzard; and texts including Robert Scully’s novel A Scarlett Pansy and early transvestite magazines; help shape the contours of, and provide the analytical basis for what I term male and/or masculine of center identified femme performance. I argue the transgression of gender norms in these performances and the identifications these performance index—such as sissy, drag queen, transvestite— form connective threads between these disparate identities that enable a coalitional politics of effeminacy to emerge.

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My dissertation’s title Mincing and Screaming offers, not only a campy descriptor for the performances at the heart of my research, but also a theoretical framework through which to understand their political, social, and emotional valences. Acts of “mincing and screaming”—borrowed from Richard Dyer who uses these descriptors to define the practice of “camping”—have been met at best with derision and at worst with violence over the course of the 20th century. Femme performances by those presumed to be men are dismissed as a joke, even by many queer individuals. Instead, this dissertation takes mincing and screaming seriously, as acts that joyfully and defiantly proclaim identity, as acts of space claiming and world making in the face of a toxic cis/straight femmephobic hegemony, as acts that tenuously link disparate groups of male and/or masculine of center identified folk into a coalitional politics of nonnormative gender and sexual practices. Mincing and screaming, and the panoply of embodied acts these words index, are disruptive performances, taking up physical, sonic space, and psychic space. I contest that mincing and screaming describes everyday acts of revolution through the failure, disinterest, and/or refusal to participate in routinized performances of normative gender.