Co-Created Anthropology: Drag, Disability and Performance

Join us for this combined talk, film screening and q+a that explores drag and performance as co-creative methods for understanding the inner lifeworlds of paralysis and disability.

Working with and alongside people with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), a degenerative condition involving the loss of speech, facial expression and body movement, we explore how anthropology might experiment with alternative ethnographic approaches. Many people with MND only have limited means of communication, for example moving one’s chin, cheek or eyes. Although MND prevents speech and forms of external communication, by necessity it comprises a rich inner life—encompassing streams of profound thought, memory, fantasy and imagination—which define existence and constitute the life of being “locked-in”.

Together we will explore how drag can be used as a vehicle for understanding the vitality and variability of embodied experience, subjectivity and identity, for critiquing normative presuppositions and categories, and for understanding the relationship between inner- life, sensorimotor engagement and public expression.

Then you will be invited to a screening of the world’s first ever Drag Show created, designed and directed by eye-movement, with sound design and music composed by eye, chin and breath. A collaboration between Sarah Ezekiel and Alex Herd, both living with MND, and anthropologists Andrew Irving and Mike Atkins (aka Cheddar Gorgeous) Ms MaNDY’s Adventures in Wonderland premiered in 2025 to sold out audiences, exploring the extraordinary lifeworlds of being “locked-in”, featuring international drag superstars Cheddar Gorgeous, Black Peppa, Tete Bang, Pixie Polite and Chanukah Lewinsky, followed by a Q+A.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher ASA People Fest