Kate Harris
PhD
Gender Studies
Kate (she/her) is a PhD candidate at University of Melbourne, exploring Melbourne's drag scene through the lens of its fashion and costume makers. This research foregrounds her professional and personal experience as a sewist. Her academic background encompasses art history, social anthropology, ethnomusicology, and fashion design. Her honours and master's research explored the relationships between fashion, popular music, and performances of identity in genres such as rock n' roll through Harry Styles' queer/femme dandyism, and contemporary hip-hop in her home city of Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand.
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Thesis
Making a queer world: Costume makers' contributions to drag in Melbourne/Naarm
My thesis investigates practices of making and the experiences of makers of drag fashion, using the case study of Melbourne/Naarm. Drag's costuming is an under-researched aspect of its queer performance practice, while its makers are drag's unsung heroes. Influenced by new materialism, I theorise drag as an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors whose co-constitutive agencies and materialities collaboratively produce drag’s alternative gender embodiments. The embodied knowledges of drag's costume makers are explored through observing and participating in making and performance processes through ethnographic methods.
Research interests
- Fashion
- Queer Studies
- Performance
- Anthropology