Kayte Stokoe

Kayte is currently an affiliate researcher in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Having undertaken undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Kayte obtained a doctoral scholarship on the AHRC-funded project ‘Queer Theory in France’, based jointly at the University of Warwick and King’s College London. Kayte’s thesis was supervised by the project’s Co-investigator, Dr Oliver Davis.

Research Interests

Kayte’s research spans a range of areas, which include, but are not limited to, critical disability studies, drag studies, feminism and transfeminism, and medicalization. Their current research aims to develop a transfeminist approach to drag, which challenges the definition of drag as ‘performing as the opposite sex’ – a definition which is unable to account for the diverse identities, performances, and forms of embodiment which are present in current drag scenes. Kayte is also developing plans for a postdoctoral project, which will explore the medicalization of gender diversity in France, the U.K, and the U.S. from 1880 to the present. Kayte is passionately invested in marginalized people’s right to determine and describe their own identities and experiences. Kayte is on Twitter as @drkaytestokoe.

Key Publications

Book

Reframing Drag: Beyond Subversion and the Status Quo, London: Routledge, under contract. Forthcoming 2019.

Book chapter

‘A Transfeminist Critique of Drag Discourses and Performance Styles in Three National Contexts (U.S., France, and U.K.): From RuPaul’s Drag Race to Bar Wotever’ in Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene, eds. Stephen Farrier and Mark Edward. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Forthcoming 2019.

‘Medicalizing Sexuality, Medicalizing Gender: Sexological Discourses in Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)’. In Histories of Sexology: Between Science and Politics, eds. Alain Giami and Sharman Levinson (working title) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming, Date TBC.

‘Are Drag Kings Still Too Queer for London? From the 19th Century Impersonator to the Drag King of Today’ in Sex, Time, and Place: Queer Histories of London c. 1850 to the Present, edited by Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 97-114. 2016.

Journal article

‘Fucking the Body, Rewriting the Text: Proto-Queer Gender Expression through Textual Drag in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien’. In Queering the Second Wave, Paragraph Special Issue, eds. Lisa Downing and Lara Cox. 2016.

Bibliographical review article

‘Monique Wittig’. In Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Ed, Eugene O’Brien. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016.