Drag is not — or at least shouldn’t be — political, let alone extreme in its politics. But when such works of art are targeted by politicians and policies aimed at making them disappear from public view altogether (whether in the name of country, church, children, or any combination thereof), drag artists have little recourse but to make their own bodies. And bodies of work represent something. In director Agnia Galdanova’s remarkable documentary Queendom, the audience is invited to witness the hateful extremes of Jenna Marvin. The young non-binary drag artist prefers to design and display her work with little to no worry. However, at every turn, Putin’s Russia’s increasingly violent anti-LGBT policies push her to find a way out.
A graceful young Russian woman with no hair on her head and no eyebrows to speak of has painted her entire head pearly white. I’ve also drawn on a few black and white clown-like decorations on her face (teardrop lines around the eyes, and bold black lines around the perimeter of the mouth). With a white lacy collar, a matching corset, and a pair of black leather boots and gloves (and a stylish eggshell coat for warmth), she begins her day. This entails first doing an impromptu photo shoot amid the snowy and icy landscape that surrounds her, and then going grocery shopping. Only, as these early scenes in “Queendom” make clear, such a simple, ordinary day only happens when Jenna is asked to leave the grocery store.
The inconsistency of such a scene (two officers assert that they are not expelling Gina but are in fact only asking her to leave because her clothing “disturbs the peace”) places the audience firmly in an untenable position from which Gina is unable to escape. She’s just trying to live her life. But such a life is becoming increasingly impossible, because Gina now lives in rural Russia in the wintery Siberian town of Magadan. She was no longer in Moscow, a city that initially seemed most open to Gina’s appeal, yet proved inhospitable when her political activism—public, defiant, unabashedly strange, and avant-garde—forced her to turn back. With her grandparents (who can’t help but incur the wrath of their beloved grandson by demanding that they extinguish their overconfident sense of self).
“Whenever I step out in character, I’m on top of the world,” Jenna tells the camera. “No one, not even here in Russia, can scare me.” It’s a powerful sentiment that goes along with the creatures Jenna transforms into through makeup, wigs, and innovative clothing. Sometimes, Jenna goes out in public looking like an alien that confuses everyone around her, especially when she’s crawling across the floor of subway trains or just walking down the grocery aisle. In others, all covered in gold foil, they invoke a sense of emptiness that makes the amusement park around them feel even more empty and depressing. If the world wants to see and treat her as “other,” Jenna’s public performance art seems intent instead on finding power in such visibility. It’s this work that has earned her nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram alone.
But the extreme resilience of Gina’s costumes and dazzling performances (spiky images meant to terrorize and unsettle) isn’t all there is to it. Yes, “Queendom” depicts stunning scenes in which Jenna (wearing little more than barbed wire or adorning a coral-like wig) shows off the enormous range of her talents. But Galdanova’s talent here lies not only in revealing Gina’s most vulnerable moments — those agonizing phone calls to her grandparents, the frantic moments before key visa appointments and the bouts of tears that follow hateful physical assaults — but in refusing to see them separate from Gina’s armored masks. Wearable any day.
That’s why arguably one of the most poignant scenes in the film comes when one of those single shots was meant to provide a view of one of Jenna’s outfits (a dark bodysuit with long, spindly fingers and a matching insect headdress) but falls apart. The eerie electronic music of Toke Brorson Odin and Damien Vandesande records the silent screams that Gina emits in pain as she writhes around the desolate sandy floor and frolics wildly in a nearby puddle. The more Jenna exhausted herself, the more the moment of sublime beauty became a moment of intense, horrific pain. It’s tiring to be so flexible. However, that’s all she can do in a world that would rather silence her.
“Queendom” is a powerful portrait of an eccentric artist and a sly call to arms. Thus, it also serves as an example of how one and the other are not easily separated. Gina’s activism is connected to her art precisely because her very existence is a political purpose. By choosing to live defiantly, and putting her own journey on display for all the world to see, Jenna has paved a path for herself to find in her drag art a way to reshape the world so she never has to keep hiding. Not so you don’t stand out but so you don’t have to stand constantly.