Fauxnique wields a provocative, wry framework of drag, dance, and philosophy to confront identity, femininity, and self-image.

How Do I Look? is the latest work from Monique Jenkinson/Fauxnique, the multifaceted artist, choreographer, writer, and performer best known as the first cisgender woman anywhere, ever to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. With her rigorous ballet training buried in the bottom of her artistic toolbox, Jenkinson emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance lineage and into the nightclub scene. There, she fashioned Fauxnique in a laboratory of liberatory radical queer performance, reclaiming ballet and learning to use drag and theory as modes of inquiry and entertainment. Jenkinson brings this fluency to this latest work.

Now she dons her drag queen guise and wields her unique combination of precise physicality, irreverent humor, and gutsy vulnerability to ask the most vain, mundane, and loaded question: How Do I Look? With it, she digs past glossy platitudes and flattering exaggerations into the hot mess of perception, subjectivity, identity, and taste. How Do I Look? throws itself into the space—sometimes a chasm—between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. As always, Jenkinson’s work resists dogmatic answers and leans into philosophical modes of questioning, considering the methodology of looking: by what means do we see the world and each [...]