Housewerk: How Drag Performers Engage in Emotional Labor While Navigating Community Care

This dissertation examines drag performance as a form of service labor shaped by emotional labor, community care, and identity-based inequality. Drawing on interviews with drag performers shows how drag labor blends artistic skill, emotional regulation, interpersonal care, and entrepreneurial labor. While these demands mirror service sector roles in other industries, drag remains underrecognized and undervalued, particularly for performers who do not conform to white, cisgender norms. The study introduces Housewerk—an adaptation of Marlon Bailey’s concept of housework (Bailey, 2013)—to describe the mix of paid and unpaid labor drag performers engage in. Housewerk captures how performers must balance self-preservation (branding, income, emotional health) with social obligation (activism, mentorship, visibility), often at a personal cost. Marginalized performers—including trans artists, drag kings, intersex performers, and performers of color—report heightened emotional burdens, tokenization, and exclusion from booking and leadership opportunities. These findings build on and extend the work of Bailey (2013), Román (2005), and Piepzna-Samarasinha (2016;2018), who conceptualize queer and trans labor through kinship, care, and community survival. By drawing on and expanding theories of emotional and affective labor (Hochschild, 1983; Wharton, 1993; Ahmed, 2004; Kang, 2003; Carastathis, 2015; Niall, 2022), this dissertation reframes drag as labor that is simultaneously artistic, political, and communal. It contributes to sociological understandings of work, identity, and inequality by demonstrating how emotional labor operates in informal, identity-based economies where care and performance are demanded but not protected.