Book Review: Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures: The Rise and Fall of a Lesbian Social Scene

Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures (Intimate Investments) offers evocative and theoretically rich insight into the affective investments of participants into Sydney’s bygone drag king scene. Kerryn Drysdale’s own intimate investment into Sydney’s lesbian nightlife (known as ‘Dyke Night’) enriches her academic, yet personal, exploration of this creative industry, which operated in Sydney’s lesbian hotspot of Newtown from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. This work is an important contribution to the application of scene thinking and its complementary relationship to queer theory. Perhaps even more importantly, this book, and the methods that helped to form it, are now a tangible part of the precarious archive of Sydney’s drag king scene and the lesbian social life that attached to it.