Dragging AI: Technotemporalities towards queer futures

Parslow, Joe (2026) Dragging AI: Technotemporalities towards queer futures. In: The Routledge Companion to Drag. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 523-533. ISBN 9781003355564

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Abstract

This chapter explores The Zizi Project, led by Jake Elwes and Me The Drag Queen, which sits at the intersection of drag performance and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simultaneously, it stages how researchers research and write about artworks and performances they are connected to (emotionally, personally, financially) and how research and writing interrupts and is interrupted by timelines of artistic practices closely connected to precarious funding and socio-economic landscapes. To do this, the chapter looks to The Zizi Project to explore tricky relationships between time, space, and bodies emerging in the co-presence of live and digital bodies on stage or in artistic spaces, as well as what drag does to AI (and, in some cases, what AI does to drag). The constructed nature of drag, and the AI versions and deepfakes of drag produced by The Zizi Project, offer complex temporalities where past, present, and future collide and coalesce. The chapter considers the role of time and temporalities in queer studies and explores critical interventions by artists and activists resisting the normativising and exploitative actions of companies such as OpenAI. It stages the queer potential of deepfake drag and explores the feelings The Zizi Project produced for the author and drag community members, highlighting how attending to feelings is an important mode of understanding queer works.

Item Type:	Book Section
Divisions:	Queer Performance
Depositing User:	Joe Parslow
Date Deposited:	12 Oct 2026 05:31
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2026 05:31
URI:	https://bruford.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/93

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