SYNOPSIS

In these two practice-based and theoretical sessions, the creation of the drag queen is investigated as an artistic, performative, and narrative device through the concepts of Afrofabulation, formulated by Tavia Nyong’o, and Critical Fabulation, proposed by Saidiya Hartman. Led by Thiago Romero, the experience explores drag as a technology of self-fabulation, historical rewriting, and the invention of possible worlds, especially in response to the historical erasures of Black bodies and gender- and sexuality-dissident identities.

To afrofabulate, in this context, is to activate the power of the body as a living archive capable of producing insurgent narratives that escape normative logics of representation. Inspired by Critical Fabulation, invention becomes method: fabulation not to erase historical violence, but to create cracks, fissures, and possibilities of existence. The drag queen thus emerges as a figure moving between memory, imagination, and future, embodying narratives that do not fit official records but persist in bodies, gestures, humor, and orality.

The workshop combines practical drag-creation procedures—such as transformation (montação), stage presence, and lip-sync—understood as narrative strategies. Intended for artists, performers, drag artists, and those interested in contemporary creative processes, the sessions invite participants to experience drag as a practice of thought and as an expanded field between art, politics, ancestry, and fabulation.