The Bodies of Others

"Schwartz offers a comprehensive and captivating analysis of the social, temporal, and historical functions of drag, countering hegemonic, cisgender, heterosexual histories of dance, embodiment, and performance. ... This important book will appeal to readers and researchers interested in queer theory, temporality, embodiment, and performance. Recommended."
—CHOICE

* CHOICE *

"Selby Wynn Schwartz’s The Bodies of Others takes an expansive view of drag dance on the concert stage, weaving together dance studies, gender theory, and historiography to ask how four decades of drag dancers performed as other selves... As the first book-length study of drag dance on the US concert stage it provides an analytic that is deeply important to wider drag scholarship."
—Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism

* Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism *

"The Bodies of Others is at its most thrilling when identifying the methods through which performance—which is temporal, first and foremost—finds new ways of communicating between artist and spectator, or, as is often the case in dance works, when the artist is split and the two communicating are dancer and choreographer."
—Charles O'Malley, Theatre Survey

* Theatre Survey *

"The Bodies of Others is truly successful in mapping, contextualizing, and critically analyzing the fascinating yet understudied phenomenon of drag dance and in seeing its very real utopian potential."
—Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts

* Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts *

"In her theoretically engaged study, Schwartz illuminates the important role that drag dance—as a complicated, messy, evolving kinesthetic practice—can play in our understanding of our own subjectivity and of the world that is created by the form’s assertions of multiple experiences and desires for belonging. ...With its beautifully descriptive language and rigorous analyses, this monograph articulates the material realities and political possibilities of drag as a culturally significant project of generous relationality."
—Alison Bory, Theatre Journal

* Theatre Journal *

Winner: American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 2020 Sally Banes Publication Prize

* ASTR Sally Banes Publication Prize *

Finalist: 2020 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction

* Lambda Literary Awards *

Finalist: Theatre Library Association (TLA) 2019 George Freedley Memorial Award for Outstanding Theater Books

* TLA George Freedley Memorial Award *

"The Bodies of Others is an impressive, generous, and necessary book. It will undoubtedly appeal to students, scholars, and artists interested in the performance of queer and trans femininities, drag performance, legacies of inheritance in dance history,
and studies of race and ethnicity. For dance instructors and choreographers, The Bodies of Others is a valuable lesson. The drag dances featured in this book undo a masculinist, heterosexual, Euro-colonial, and cisgender knot in dance training, casting, and technique, forging a more open and inclusive practice of dance for the many queer and trans dancers in our midst."

* Theatre Topics *

“Connects drag performance to multiple dance histories, tracing how choreography and gesture have long been central to how drag performers and scholars of drag performance have reimagined gender. Substantively researched and tightly argued, the book makes a strong contribution to central and exciting conversations in performance studies and dance studies.”
—Clare Croft, University of Michigan

"Makes a passionate case for drag dance as so much more than a surface-level donning of another identity… the book presents drag dance as a rigorous practice of generosity and discipline, of historiography and politics, of mourning and imagining alternative futures, and, ultimately, of queer kinship. In captivating prose that is often playful and poignant, Schwartz compels us to approach drag dancers themselves as serious theorists of gender, embodiment, and temporality."
—Anthea Kraut, University of California, Riverside