drag? demeaning? to whom?
Apr. 2nd, 2004 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxI'm curious what other feminists think about drag. There was a question on WHB last week about whether men in drag were demeaning women. My thought was HUH? As IF! - but there were others who disagreed, and I'd like more thoughts.
You can read what I wrote on my blog or...
...I think it's too simple to say men in drag demean women. I think it's way too simple to say gay men in drag demean women. And what about women in drag? What about drag as performance art?
I'll grant this article one point. There is an implication of gender inequity in the idea of straight men dressing comically as female stereotypes. To borrow a cliched image that I've never seen played outside a sitcome, there's the Powder Puff football cheerleader (Powder Puff football, if you haven't watched as much TV as I have, is when the high school cheerleaders and football team trade places, to much ensuing hijinks). A large man dressed as a cheerleader is funny precisely because he's clearly not a woman. And there is certainly inequity in the range of female stereotypes that we're all familiar with - namely, that it's pretty easy to pick up on "slut", "virginal bimbo", etc., but male stereotypes can be a little less obvious (and generally are based on media icons more than "types"). But the Powder Puff cheerleader also has a counterpart - the girl acting out the role of big jock boy. Are they 100% equal? No. It's pretty clear from the cultural result of feminism (women acting more "masculine" but men not acting loads more "feminine") that we think being a boy is better. So they can't be equal.
But I think our response to both is very similar.
The second before you begin to laugh, your body tenses much like it does the second before you decide to run away. Not to get all sociobiology on you, but to make the point that we laugh about things that are strange or challenging. I think we laugh at "normal, straight" people in drag because they convey simultaneously the image of what we think they are and what we think they're not. And on some level we realize the boundaries between are and are-not are artificial.
Drag as art and drag as an element of queer identity are a whole other story. I think a lot of queer identity is caught up in appropriating supposedly other-gendered behaviors, and drag can be a magnification and exaggeration of that. It's not even so much imitative of women as taking on an opposite, non-man, identity. To be queer and in drag is to declare I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK. As a part of identity, or as part of a performance, that can be very powerful. It can also be silly and excessive, but it's a part of queer culture I'm personally quite fond of. Drag seems to say "Call us sissys? Fags? Well, fuck you, we ARE sissys and fags, and we're so fabulous we don't give a damn if you're sorry." It creates a problem for a straight community that is uncomfortable with sliding gender, and a problem for a gay community that wants to be seen as part of normal.
Why isn't drag part of normal? Why isn't over the top gender behavior normal? Not easy questions.
It's odd to me that the article Morgaine referenced cites Judith Butler but doesn't bring up the question of women in drag. Butler's "Female Masculinities" (which I've read only about a chapter of) talks quite a bit on that subject, and on the long history of women dressing in men's clothes - or otherwise "masculinely" - as a similar phenomenon to men-in-drag-as-queerness. That is, women in drag are also claiming an identity as "other", not appropriating man-ness, but appropriating ideas of what is masculine. The drag king thang seems a lot like it's queeny counterpart - kinda complicated, kinda challenging.
And that does not demean me.
You can read what I wrote on my blog or...
...I think it's too simple to say men in drag demean women. I think it's way too simple to say gay men in drag demean women. And what about women in drag? What about drag as performance art?
I'll grant this article one point. There is an implication of gender inequity in the idea of straight men dressing comically as female stereotypes. To borrow a cliched image that I've never seen played outside a sitcome, there's the Powder Puff football cheerleader (Powder Puff football, if you haven't watched as much TV as I have, is when the high school cheerleaders and football team trade places, to much ensuing hijinks). A large man dressed as a cheerleader is funny precisely because he's clearly not a woman. And there is certainly inequity in the range of female stereotypes that we're all familiar with - namely, that it's pretty easy to pick up on "slut", "virginal bimbo", etc., but male stereotypes can be a little less obvious (and generally are based on media icons more than "types"). But the Powder Puff cheerleader also has a counterpart - the girl acting out the role of big jock boy. Are they 100% equal? No. It's pretty clear from the cultural result of feminism (women acting more "masculine" but men not acting loads more "feminine") that we think being a boy is better. So they can't be equal.
But I think our response to both is very similar.
The second before you begin to laugh, your body tenses much like it does the second before you decide to run away. Not to get all sociobiology on you, but to make the point that we laugh about things that are strange or challenging. I think we laugh at "normal, straight" people in drag because they convey simultaneously the image of what we think they are and what we think they're not. And on some level we realize the boundaries between are and are-not are artificial.
Drag as art and drag as an element of queer identity are a whole other story. I think a lot of queer identity is caught up in appropriating supposedly other-gendered behaviors, and drag can be a magnification and exaggeration of that. It's not even so much imitative of women as taking on an opposite, non-man, identity. To be queer and in drag is to declare I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK. As a part of identity, or as part of a performance, that can be very powerful. It can also be silly and excessive, but it's a part of queer culture I'm personally quite fond of. Drag seems to say "Call us sissys? Fags? Well, fuck you, we ARE sissys and fags, and we're so fabulous we don't give a damn if you're sorry." It creates a problem for a straight community that is uncomfortable with sliding gender, and a problem for a gay community that wants to be seen as part of normal.
Why isn't drag part of normal? Why isn't over the top gender behavior normal? Not easy questions.
It's odd to me that the article Morgaine referenced cites Judith Butler but doesn't bring up the question of women in drag. Butler's "Female Masculinities" (which I've read only about a chapter of) talks quite a bit on that subject, and on the long history of women dressing in men's clothes - or otherwise "masculinely" - as a similar phenomenon to men-in-drag-as-queerness. That is, women in drag are also claiming an identity as "other", not appropriating man-ness, but appropriating ideas of what is masculine. The drag king thang seems a lot like it's queeny counterpart - kinda complicated, kinda challenging.
And that does not demean me.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-03 08:32 am (UTC)I think there's something to be said for the theory that drag is feminist. It takes some of the more restrictive and artificial appearance standards designated as feminine, exaggerates them, and puts them on men. That feels confusing, and the confusion might just make you think about how artificial gender roles really are.
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Date: 2012-11-01 03:38 am (UTC)