Bloomsbury Becoming Queen: Voice and Identity in Drag Lip-Sync Performance

Exploring the academically uncharted domain of drag lip-sync performance through ethnographic research with five London-based drag queens, Becoming Queen theorizes lip-syncing both as a unique performative medium and as a mode of self-construction for the performing queen. Popularly reviled and publicly ridiculed, lip-syncing is most often associated with inauthenticity, fakery, and deception: why then has it become the ne plus ultra of drag performance? Far from the criticism of stars like Britney and Milli Vanilli, drag queens have elevated lip-syncing to the apex of their craft, praised for their skill, ingenuity, humour, and heart. Becoming Queen asks how this came to pass and interrogates why lip-syncing is such a powerful art form, focusing on the lives and work of five London-based drag performers. This text approaches lip-syncing with two questions in mind: 1) what is lip-syncing? and 2) why are drag queens so drawn to this mode of performance, over any other? Drawing on voice studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, Becoming Queen dissects lip-syncing as a mode of voicing. Jacob Mallinson Bird argues that lip-syncing is, in fact, not dissimilar to many of our more quotidian acts of speech: unveiling lip-syncing reveals more about the strangeness of voice than it does the fallacy of lip-syncing. Moreover, rather than an alienating act of deception, lip-syncing in such contexts can be a self-affirming performance, one in which the performing queen speaks alongside her own queer idols and pop stars, stitching together multiple bodies and voices into a patchwork of polyvocality. It underscores the stakes of lip-syncing in London’s contemporary drag scene: what lip-syncing is, and why it matters.