Drag Queen in the Beauty Salon: What Theorising Strange Bedfellows Can Tell Us about the Labour of Aunties

Abstract

Abstract LaWhore Vagistan, a South Asian drag queen, meets Noor, a South Asian beauty salon owner, in this essay to illustrate the kind of work diasporic aunties do for other migrant women. Aunties engage in aesthetic and emotional labour to build diasporic spaces of beauty and intimacy. The affective power of these spaces for migrant women and queer folks becomes legible at the intersections of gender, race and class. In this essay, I employ drag as a lens to understand the work of the diasporic beautician, putting into conversation two aunties who may seem antithetical to each other at first glance.