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Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender As Performance

This book was written for University of Michigan Press's "Critical Performances" series, in each volume of which a scholar collaborates with a performer/artist to present documentation of her or his work. This volume, documenting and contextualising Diane Torr's work as a performance artist and female-to-male cross-dresser, combines biographical and historical narrative, critical analysis, and selected performance texts. Bottoms undertook full responsibility for the assembly of the book. In addition to writing the sections attributed to him as co-author, he also assembled the sections attributed to Torr, by (i) selecting from and editing pre-existing textual material, and (ii) conducting, transcribing, and editing a series of interviews with the artist. Similarly, the joint-authored sections were created by Bottoms writing around text taken from Torr's interview materials. Torr read and commented on all draft chapters (through at least 3 distinct drafts), offering corrections, clarifications and further observations, which Bottoms then incorporated in redrafts. Bottoms also copy-edited the performance texts section, with Torr's approval - in some cases by combining material from various different script drafts and video recordings. Thus, although the co-authorship relationship is publicly presented as 50/50, in practice the distribution of workload could more accurately be estimated at 80/20 (Torr, as an independent artist, could not afford to take extensive time to work on a book without remuneration).