Image credit: Interior of a drag bar. A shelf displays a sign reading “DRAG ARTISTS FOR FREE PALESTINE!” Photograph by Jennifer Kaplan.

This month I was happy to sit down virtually with Jennifer Kaplan, a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley whose research focuses on non-binary francophone linguistics within Montreal’s drag king scene.  

Kaplan is currently working on a dissertation that uses transfeminist and linguistic ethnographic methods to study francophone queer, trans, and non-binary communities in Montreal. She’s investigating what kinds of languages are being used, how they are negotiated and adapted creatively during drag performances, as well as the social expectations surrounding their usage.  

Ally Krueger-Kischak: To start off, can you tell us a bit about how you came to this research? Why Montreal? Why drag kings? 

Jennifer Kaplan: I came to Montreal first by accident. In undergrad I was applying for summer funding to research non-binary French, but the grant I applied for wouldn’t cover roundtrip airfare to France — so I chose Montreal instead.  

The drag part was also a bit of a happy accident. In February 2025, I was sitting in a drag bar watching some kings strut around and I thought to myself: What if I added drag data to my dissertation? It wasn’t going to interfere with the fieldwork I was doing at community organizations during the day, and I knew it would be incredibly easy to get consent from artists to record (they already beg to be filmed!) so I figured: Why not? 

AKK: Do you notice generational differences in the drag king scene, particularly around language and terminology?  

JK: For better or worse, most of the kings I follow are pretty young (early 30s and younger, but predominantly in their 20s) so I don’t have a ton of data on intergenerational dynamics among the kings themselves. 

AKK: A lot of conversations around non-binary and gender-inclusive language tend to focus solely on anglophone communities. What unique dynamics emerge in francophone contexts, especially given the deeply gendered structures of Romance languages? How does that play out in a city like Montreal? 

JK: French is a grammatically binary language—nouns, including nouns to refer to people, are masculine or feminine. So where does that leave non-binary folks? Across francophone contexts, this has led to new words being created. You see things like adelphe being used as a gender-neutral term for sibling, since French traditionally only had frère (brother) or sœur (sister.)  

I’ve also observed people defaulting to nouns that can already refer to people of any gender in French, like artiste. So someone might say les artistes instead of les performeurs, the latter being generic masculine.   

Montreal is fascinating because so many people are bilingual, so there’s always the option to switch into English. What I’m interested in is the linguistic choices people make: do they use the generic masculine? Both the masculine and feminine? A neologism? An English borrowing? 

AKK: You mentioned that you’re working on how misgenderings and moments of slippage are navigated creatively in the drag scene. Can you speak more about this? Do you have any examples that have really stuck with you from your research? 

JK: Yes! There was a moment in my fieldwork where a drag queen invited one of the kings I follow, Maximum Powers, to join her onstage. Max was out of drag as an audience member.  

The queen had a clear moment of uncertainty about how to refer to him, saying: “you are a good person and a good (pause) ((questioning tone)) boy, girl, Maximum.” Max then capitalized on this moment of gender confusion in an extremely playful way by shrugging dramatically. I laughed at that.  

The drag queen then said, “You are a good king.” I interpret this as a moment where the queen chose to recognize Max through his drag persona rather than trying to resolve gender uncertainty directly.  

But I also think that playful, dramatic shrug created space for Max to reclaim the interaction for himself. Max transformed the queen’s confusion into something subversive and ended up challenging the gender binary more broadly. 

AKK: Finally, what do you hope readers and fellow researchers take away from your work? And where do you see this research leading next? 

JK: I hope people can recognize that queer folks aren’t out here to ‘ruin’ the French language. The discussions we’re seeing about being able to include non-binary folks linguistically, and the actual forms that are being used, point to a really interesting phenomenon: That grammatical gender systems can change as shifting discourses around gender change. The evolution of language is natural! It’s happening around us all the time. 

I’m really hoping to continue doing ethnographic work with Montreal’s drag communities during a post-doc, although for that project I plan on shifting my focus from language to social and economic dynamics in the drag scene. Stay tuned! 

Thank you again to Jennifer Kaplan for taking the time to speak with us about her work. By centering the experiences and linguistic innovations emerging from Montreal’s drag king scene, Kaplan’s research offers an important intervention into how we think about language, gender, and performance.  

Her work highlights not only how language can reinforce social structures, but also how those structures are constantly being reshaped through improvisation, play, and everyday interaction.  

We’re excited to see where her research goes next.

Jennifer Kaplan is a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation uses queer theory, transfeminism, and linguistic ethnography to examine language practices, linguistic attitudes, and ideologies within francophone queer, trans, and non-binary communities in Montreal.

Ally Krueger-Kischak (any/all) is a Research Assistant on the Drag Kings Oral History Project. As an MA candidate in History and Sexual Diversity Studies, their research explores trans and queer rural histories, futurities, and working-class environmentalism in Southern Ontario.