Playing it fashionably queer: Mae West's performing sexuality

“Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution”. With this challenging innuendo, the American actress and author Mae West offers an insight into gender performativity and heteronormativity through marriage in a period, the “Roaring Twenties”, in which sexual and gender politics could not be put into scrutiny. Her vamp persona and the elaborated iconography that she crafted on her character gave birth to a meticulous semiotics of the body that eventually undermined the American social context of the time fostering on the one hand, an image of heterosexual desire, and on the other hand an appealing icon to a gay market. This article ventures a queer-oriented perspective on West’s charismatic character and on the intertwined effects that tie semiotics to body language, especially focussing on the plays Sex (1926) and The Drag (1927).