Gender Shift: Women Who Make Men

A conversation on the creation of male characters by women between Drag King Pioneer Diane Torr and acclaimed Scottish writer Zoë Strachan.

Thursday 17th November, 6pm to 7.30pm (£3/free)

Diane Torr has been teaching women how to dress and pass as men on city streets around the world for twenty years. Zoë Strachan has recently published her third novel and has, for the first time, created a gay male protagonist. What happens when women ‘inhabit’ the bodies and psyches of men? What can be learnt by undertaking this gender shift and how has this work, along with the work of other women writers and performers playing with sex and gender, impacted on ideas of gender and masculinity.

Booking is essential. To register your interest please complete the quick booking form below or call us on 0141 248 9969. If you are not already a member of the library you can join here and it is completely free.

Both authors will have books available to purchase on the evening and will be available for signing copies. More information below.

Diane Torr, “Sex, Drag and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance“, co-authored by Stephen Bottoms and published by the University of Michigan Press.

“Few books blend the critical and creative approaches to drag performance this provocatively and engagingly, and none provides both the historical and the personal perspectives so effectively. Torr and Bottoms fundamentally challenge many long-standing ideas about drag kings and the performance of masculinity.”
— Sarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo

“This book brings the reader inside an artist’s creative imagination and intellect, showing us Diane Torr’s work in a detailed, thoughtful, and engaging way. We discover how Torr uses different physical disciplines to explore how gender is constructed, interpreted, and expressed. Along the way—by taking us into various venues in which she performed—she evokes the lively, dynamic scene in New York in the ’80s and ’90s.”
— Alisa Solomon, Columbia University

Zoë Strachan, “Ever Fallen in Love” (Sandstone Press) shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize for LGBT literature 2011.

‘Strachan’s maturity and insight shows through the beautifully constructed pages. The tempo stays effortlessly high and the tension keeps building along with Richard’s desire. . . . Ever Fallen In Love might be the one to catapult her into the mainstream’
– Gutter magazine

‘There is no doubt this is a hard-boiled book and it pulls no punches. Strachan writes in great detail about the psychology of her protagonists with objectivity and perception. The incredible trick she pulls off is that we do end up identifying with her introverted hero Richard, mainly because his journey is so complex and constantly blighted by his hopeless sexual obsession with the straight, taunting, malignant Luke’
– Alice Thompson, Scottish Review of Books

‘The novel excels at evoking the mind games, the vile but subtly plotted erosion which one driven friend can exert on another. The first-person segments power the narrative, dragging the reader into the layers of tangled dependence as Richard falls foul of Luke’s excesses . . . astute, intelligent, almost entirely convincing’
– Tom Adair, Scotsman

‘Ever Fallen in Love doesn’t disappoint. A quietly unsettling take on the coming-of-age genre, Strachan’s novel avoids the more obvious shock-factor conclusion and instead continually teeters on the edge. Unafraid of the unspoken and the unresolved, the story gets under your skin and lingers there uncomfortably’
– Lucy Scholes, Sunday Times

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