Realness & the Digital Archive: South African Drag Online

This articles analyses the process of forming a digital archive of the Miss Gay Western Cape pageant in South Africa in relation to pageant participants' use of social media as a personal and professional archive. Moving between these platforms Lease charts a geographical move from the Cape Flats to the township, Khayelitsha, and to African-based and global drag and trans networks. In order to change the focus from criticism to innovation, Lease argues that researchers need to attend to the ways in which performers navigate and negotiate, undermine and transgress social media's enforced rules in order to produce the archive not as a stable or fixed document of the past, but as an expansive network that opens new forms of identification and connectivity. In this way, social media also becomes a site of queer action, and the labour to produce such action is made visible. Research into drag performance needs to attend to the entanglements of comment and image on social media platforms in order to trace the historical trajectory of such performance practices that move from and between the stage and the digital. Lease argues that turning away from social media limits our understanding and activation of queer collective memory and flattens such performance histories. Realness as a category of the pageant can thus shape the tension between the performed and the actualised in digital space.