The Beauty and the Beast
Reflections About the Socio-Historical and Subcultural Context of Drag Queens and “Tunten” in Berlin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3609600 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carsten Balzer (Freie Universität Berlin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 55-71 |
| Publication date | 2004-04-20 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Homosexuality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-8369 • E-ISSN: 1540-3602 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1300/j082v46n03_04 |
| PMID | 15132483 |
| OpenAlex | W826730288 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 9 |
In this article, I focus on two different faces found in Berlin's gay subculture: the Tunten and the drag queens. Both are commonly seen as "male homosexual transvestites," although many such individuals today prefer to identify themselves somewhere within a diverse transgender spectrum rather than as transvestites. Tunten and drag queens differ in their gender performativity, their self-image and their chosen role models as well as in the niches in which they have been able to establish themselves in German mainstream society. Based on ethnographic data, I argue against the widespread reductionist view that the differences between Tunten and drag queens lie primarily in style, behavior, talent and success. Nor can these differences be easily explained away as a result of subculture globalization. Instead, I show that there is a simultaneous coexistence of both a subculturally established, "traditional" local transgender culture and a more recently adopted and partly imported, new local transgender culture. The coexistence of these two urban transgender cultures also indicates the paradigm shift in German gay and youth cultures of the last decades. Thus, I will emphasize the importance of the socio-historical and subcultural processes in studying transgender cultures in Western societies
Aesthetics · Beauty · Geography · German · Globalization · Political science · Queer · Sociology · Subculture (biology · Transgender · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German legal, social, and political studies · Sociology and Education Studies
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |