The House of Indigo Drag performance, beauty pageantry, and cosmopolitan femininity in Johannesburg

This study explores the world of drag performance and beauty pageantry at one of Johannesburg’s landmark gay nightclubs – Club Indigo. It examines how the participants’ consumer identities, material culture, and systems of kinship were constructed within and beyond the House of Indigo. This study investigates how this subcultural community, located at the longest-running queer institution of its kind, was shaped by the contemporary politics and realities of race, class, queerness, and gender identity. This mixed qualitative study incorporates various research materials such as interview and archival data, ethnographic fieldnotes, as well as digital and online social media content. By providing critical discourse and social semiotic analyses, this study argues that these performances of consumption were both liberating and constraining for the various subcultural members. The empirical chapters provided herein critically analyze the different ways in which queer kinship, beauty pageantry, drag performance, and self-stylization simultaneously empowered and limited claims towards belonging and queer citizenship by various members. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the scholarship on drag and beauty pageantry by paying attention to the members’ practices of consumption and the collective construction of material cultures within this subcultural context. This ethnographic study interrogates how the politics of race, class, gender, and queerness were performed through the world-making practices of drag and beauty pageantry. It provides an ethnographic snapshot into one of Johannesburg’s most premier queer subcultural communities. It also demonstrates how this landmark institution contributed to the city’s queer entertainment landscape. Moreover, it shows how this particular subcultural community enabled its members to make claims about public visibility, upward mobility, and queer citizenship in Johannesburg.