This dissertation explores trans femme cultural performance forms in the shadow of queer social representation and stratified civic incorporation in USAmerican public life across the 20th and 21st centuries. Mighty Real stakes a claim in the centrality of trans femme cultural and narrative production in queer and gay culture and in intellectual accounts of queer nightlife studies. The two primary objectives of this dissertation are: to trace the material and performance histories of trans feminine people working across culture industries in (music, literary, performance, and nightlife scenes); and to sketch an account of the specific forms of discrimination, exclusion, and disposability that trans femmes navigate in doing so. Entering into debates in critical drag histories, queer/trans performance theory, gender and feminist studies, and LGBTQ+ historiography, this dissertation identifies a critical oversight in scholarship when it comes to the relation between material experience and performance in the lives of the street queen and the femme queen, two trans femme embodiments that figure into queer studies and queer of color critique in spectacular yet scornful ways, particularly when it comes to sex work and erotic labor. Through the figures of the street queen and the femme queen, it moves from an analysis of the figures’ roles within these discourses to reappraise two queer nightlife performance genres (i.e., lipsyncing and feeling cunt) as trans feminine practices of embodiment. Drawing on archival and multisite ethnographic research of the drag pageant circuit, DIY drag scenes, and house ball culture across Chicago, New York, Paris, and Berlin, this reappraisal enters into queer nightlife scholarship and popular performance discourses to spotlight the ways that the lipsyncing and feeling cunt serve as embodied practices of trans desiring and pedagogies of erotic power.