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What happens when drag moves from the margins to the mainstream? As contemporary drag performance venues shift from gay nightclubs and bars, into sold-out theaters, this session seeks to mine queer histories to elucidate the multiple and contradictory impulses and meanings of performative acts of gender impersonation. This panel surveys how drag kings, queens, and other artists have engaged with performative acts of gender deviance as a form of resistance, and in particular explores how drag, and camp aesthetics, can function as a site for subversion and critique of gender norms, a challenge to racial discrimination, and as an anti-colonial practice. This session welcomes artists as well as art historians to submit proposals. This session invites research which considers the intersections of gender, queerness, class, race, and dis/ability.