Abstract

Drawing from a fieldwork conducted on French speaking drag king workshops in Brussels, and based on a video recording data, I will focus on walking practices mobilized by participants in bodily gendered transformation practices and approached as gender construction devices. My analysis deals with walking exercises following the make-up activity, through which participants can feel and experiment a new gendered body thanks to locomotive actions and verbal accounts referring to what they experienced. The embodied and the experiential dimensions at work in these practices allow us to shed a light on the manufacturing of performativity, i.e. how participants adopt a reflexive stance vis-à-vis of their gendered bodily transformations, a metaperformative competence, and how, in this way, participants position themselves as the scientists and the creators of their own bodily creations.