Androgynòs - Julius Kaiser (2009)

Androgynòs (Androgynous) is a video performance by the artist and Drag King Julius Kaiser featuring Kaiser and Drag Queen Sharon Le Clerc. The performance helps to blur the lines between gender identity, showing gender as something that can be “assumed and relinquished as the situation demands - rather than master identities such as sex category.” [1] By highlighting the ritual constructing a gendered persona, Kaiser and Le Clerc show the tenuous relationship between sex and gender. Starting as one sex, adopting the dress associated with the opposite sex, and displaying a face half covered in facial hair, Kaiser shows how gender identity is something that can shift or cannot be limited solely to the binary models of gender.

Julius Kaiser is a performer and Drag King who has worked in the realm of performance art since 2007 with his partner Kyrahm. They have collaborated in works which they have dubbed “living paintings” (tableaux vivants) and “human installations.” Kaiser’s artistic performances explore the social roles of gender, power, and the relations that exist between them utilizing a Drag King aesthetic. Kaiser and Kyrahm’s Human Installation, “Gender Obsolescence,” was the overture at the 2008 Drag Festival in Berlin. The performance showed the FtM (Female to Male) transition as that of a solemn ritual. It was also praised at the tenth annual International Drag King Community Extravaganza (IDKE) in Ohio as being among the world’s best performances relating to gender exploration. [2]

[1] Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman, Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), p. 128
[2] Julius Kaiser: Bio. Retrieved 2009-12-16.