The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.

Selby Wynn Schwartz is Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University.

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

"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

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

"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

"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

"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

"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."

"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

Finalist: 2020 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction