In Conversation with Pearl Harbor, Alexander Chee, and Eng-Beng Lim

Pearl Harbor’s Makeup Tutorial and Conversation with Alexander Chee and Eng-Beng Lim

Thursday, May 14, 2020

4.30pm to 6.20pm EDT

Please contact RMS@Dartmouth.edu for Zoom information and Wo Chan’s poems. Include your affiliation (community member, general public, faculty, student) in email.

Join author Alexander Chee and drag queen poet Wo Chan (Pearl Harbor) in a chimeric improv Zoom seminar that is part makeup tutorial, part discourse on race and beauty, and all boudoir kiki. Our time together will culminate in a heartfelt and dazzling group performance each of us in our cinematic little squares. Come listen, come ask, come paint, come lipsynch.

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. Wo’s poems appear in POETRY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York. Find them at @theillustriouspearl.

Wo Chan suggests you bring your lipstick and eyeliner to participate. Foundation and eyeshadow are a big plus. If folks feel shy, be creative and play with filters, dress up, accessorize, or use virtual backgrounds for the group performance. Drag should be fun and empowering and not about buying makeup.

Participants are highly encouraged to view the following optional materials:

From Wo Chan:

– Memory (drag performance)

– somewhere over the rainbow (drag performance)

– have urself a merry little xmas (drag performance)

– Videos of Wo’s full performances are on IGTV

– Do, Re, Mi a drag act dedicated to queer poet Mark Aguhar

– an essay Wo wrote about drag: Drag Poetica Essay

– We’ll Meet Again, very much a WWII that we’ll pervert for our purposes

– video of Eartha Kitt performing I Want To Be Evil, a masterclass in how to perform in the contained space of a box, something all drag queens are learning how to do right now on Zoom

– Poems (email RMS)

From Alexander Chee:

– Girl

– 1989

– The Changeling

Event Panelists:

Alexander Chee is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth, and is also a founding faculty member of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality. He is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Alex is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, and Guernica, among others.He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

photo cred: Mettie Ostrowski

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. Wo’s poetry and performance evoke an operatic sense of play that brings together the high emotions of childhood, queer identity, memory, (un)documentation, and migration. They are the winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. Their chaplet ORDER THE WORLD, MOM was published by Belladonna* in 2016. Wo’s poems appear in POETRY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and are anthologized in Vinegar & Char (University of Georgia Press), Go Home! (Feminist Press), and Bettering American Poetry (Bettering Books). As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. They are a regular guest on Sasha Velour’s Nightgowns and have performed in operas, music videos, cabarets, and short films. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York where they teach poetry workshops and perform drag shows for queer and POC communities. Find them at @theillustriouspearl”

Eng-Beng Lim is the founding Director of the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality, and Associate Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the award-winning Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU Press, 2014). His fields of study are performance and cultural studies, Asian/American studies, postcolonial/diaspora studies and queer/transnational studies. He is currently working on a book project about megastructure and performance, and another on the visual cultures of “ethnocuties.” Eng-Beng has published in many academic journals and is part of the editorial collective at Social Text.