UConn Drag Queen Research Project

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share that our symposium presentation, titled “Drag as Performance, Therapy, Activism, and Personal Expression: What Older Drag Artists Teach Us,” was accepted as part of the 2024 annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America!

Consisting of four individual paper presentations, our symposium includes disciplinary representation of scholarship on older drag artists’ lived experiences. We include policy analyses of anti-trans initiatives, social science and humanities approaches to feminist, gender, and queer theory, behavioral science on individual well-being and fortitude, and practice, specifically, drama therapy.

The date of our presentation is to be announced. Registration for the 2024 Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Conference (Nov. 13-16) is open now.

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share that we will be presenting at the annual LGBTQ Research Symposium, co-hosted by the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare and the University of Connecticut School of Social Work.

Our presentation, “The Joy, Activism, and Healing of Drag Performers Over Fifty,” will take place on June 6th at 1:30pm. The zoom link will be provided upon registration to the LGBTQ Research Symposium.

More information can be found on the symposium’s webpage.

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share that we will be presenting at the annual International Center for Life Story Innovations and Practice (ICLIP) conference on March 8th!

Our symposium presentation, titled “Voices of Older Drag Queens (Age 50+),” will include intersectional analyses of our research among disciplines such as family studies, gender theory, and queer theory.

Our presentation is scheduled from 3:30-4:30pm.

Registration for the 2024 ICLIP Conference is available until March 8th.

“HDFS Professor Couples Drag Culture, Gerontology in Her Work” (Kimberly Phillips, 2022 via UConn Today)

The pieces of Laura Donorfio’s professional life seem to have just fallen into place.

In 2004, she left her job as director of a qualitative research lab that focused on gerontology for a faculty position in human development and family sciences at UConn Waterbury – in the same city she was born and raised, and where, as a young girl, she fostered a revering love for the older generation.

To be able to share that with University students as part of a then-developing major at the campus, was a dream, she says. Five years later when the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education honored her with its distinguished teaching award, she knew she’d made a good move.

This fall, she is poised to receive the organization’s Clark Tibbitts Award for her contributions to the field of gerontological education and set to publish with two co-authors the book “Gerontology Field Placement: Internships and Practicums in the Field of Aging,” and she almost – almost – feels complete.

With an introduction to drag culture over the last few years via her adult son, Donorfio, now an associate professor, is working on research that focuses on drag queens over the age of 50 and what their motivators have been through the years in the face of adversity.

Read more, here.

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