Edward Mark

The Routledge Companion to Drag offers a comprehensive academic exploration of drag as a global, historical, and cultural phenomenon. This volume examines drag beyond its popularised media image, tracing its diverse practices across time and geography. Chapters address key themes such as the history, herstory, and theirstory of drag, its representation on television, activism, and performance traditions from the Victorian and Elizabethan stage to contemporary contexts. With contributions that extend beyond the global North, the book foregrounds intersectional perspectives on race, ethnicity, the body, class, and sexuality, while engaging with issues such as the AIDS pandemic and cultural politics. Rejecting uniformity, it embraces the complexity and multiplicity of drag cultures worldwide. The Routledge Companion to Drag is ideal for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, and Politics, and provides an essential resource for those seeking critical insights into modern and historical drag practices and its discourse.

In this paper, we argue that epistemic accounts of transparency of the sort put forward by Alex Byrne (2018) and Jordi Fernández (2013) cannot offer a sufficient explanation of the first-personal knowledge we have of our own mental states. We argue against the plausibility of their strategy by noticing that these accounts either (i) fail to present an epistemic account; (ii) assume the very knowledge they are designed to explain (i.e. knowledge of one’s first-order mental states); or, (iii) endorse a dubious inferentialist story of how we move from being in a given first-order mental state to its knowledgeable self-ascription (§1-2). Finally, we close by highlighting the difficulties involved in presenting these accounts as explanatory for states other than belief (§3) and move to suggest a pluralist approach to the study of self-knowledge (§4).