I try to casually use “they” in any situation where I’m not absolutely sure, but I think that’s mostly a cop-out on my part.
I’m just weirdly glad this article exists in a publication this large.
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Someone at open mic last week (two weeks ago?) asked me why I was changing my name now and it made me feel so good about passing.
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Is drag transphobic? There’s something about cis men becoming excessively feminine as a performance or joke that’s been rubbing me the wrong way for years now. I understand it’s place in queer history and the development of our perception of gender, but it feels fairly anachronistic in a bad way in 2019.
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Insofar as only cis men are accepted/allowed to do it, I guess it’s clear that that is a transphobic attitude, essentially by definition. But if drag was more inclusive and anyone could be a drag queen and get the same degree of acceptance, would that still be the case?
Though, depending on the attitudes towards femininity and women that are expressed, whether explicitly or implicitly, there’s also the other question of whether drag is misogynistic.
More generally, it seems to me the answer to both questions is “not inherently, but also not infrequently”, i.e. from a quick reading it seems to me there’s probably a significant degree of both misogyny and transphobia in mainstream drag, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be done a lot better.
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How do you feel about this write-up:
The question of who is a drag queen kind of gets into what I was trying to say about anachronism. In the mid 20th century, anyone could be a drag queen. It was a forum for people to venture beyond the assigned gender roles and expressions. Drag kings were also a phenomenon for AFABs who wanted to experiment with their expression. My mom was a drag king and a friend of her and my father’s who lived with us when I was in elementary school was a drag queen (all this before I was born, but they’re very open about it), so from their perspectives I understand the role drag used to serve.
But in 2019, there are other venues for that experimentation and expression, and people are using them. Maybe this is less true outside the Northeast, which is where most of my knowledge of the queer community is, but at least in my neck of the woods the trans female and AFAB element of drag has dropped out. This is what I was trying to get at as anachronism, it’s a relic from an earlier time that has lost its subversion and all that remains is an oddly conservative set of gay men.
The misogyny issue is one I hadn’t really thought about, but I think it’s even more valid than my sense of transphobia in the form. By making femininity a gimmick or punchline, drag is making a mockery of the notion. I’m not sure that there is a way to do it so that femininity is not the butt of the joke, and thus cannot envision a form of it that is not misogynistic in concept, even if it is not misogynistic in intent.
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I agree with most of the sentiments, however I also caution against treating drag as a monolith. Even among the very commercial drag performers (i.e. people on RPDR), we are seeing a large portion of the younger generation coming out as non-binary and trans.
For example:
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@Duchess How would you slot the YouTuber ContraPoints / Natalie Wynn into this? Isn’t the exaggerated theatrical nature of her characters basically drag? Is it still problematic in the same ways? It’s also notable that (AFAIK) for Natalie the initial period of experimentation and expression (before she started identifying as a woman) was indeed pretty important to her.
Insofar as femininity holistically is used as a simple gimmick or punchline you’re probably right that it’s misogynistic in concept. You may well also be right that in many places / for many people drag is no longer needed as an avenue of experimentation or expression. I have basically zero personal experience to go on in this area, but I would always caution against painting with too broad a brush (echoing @Andy above) .
The one point I’d make is that there is a significant component of gender that is performative in nature, and I think there is a role for “drag as artform” as a way of putting up a spotlight to those performative aspects of gender. That spotlight can very easily be misused, but I also think it has an important role in evolving society’s concepts of gender over time.
You’ve just hit the nail on the head on why I don’t watch ContraPoints in a way that I never could quite find words for. Although she is obviously not misogynistic or trasnphobic in content, she’s using those tropes in a way that makes me feel very uncomfortable nevertheless.
I think there may be a way to make drag a positive force for gender expression in the queer community at large again, and that might be underway, but to me drag will always mean the queens I saw at Pride in the early and mid 2000s who very much kept me an egg for years, and I’ll never be able to look past that.
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Ironically she touched on this very topic recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvM_pRfuFM
In fact, she even talked about how playing these personas was simultaneously challenging and self-affirming for her own identity.
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I think I’m done with voice therapy. It’s very draining and doesn’t make me feel any better about myself.
Voice therapy does sound like rather hard work, yeah.
Bio Queen sounds like… I dunno some kind of creature in some kind of video game. Maybe they spawn or control tyranids.
Is the nose ring new, or am I just terribly unobservant?
Terribly unobservant. I had it at CTCon.
A year ago today my deadname played his last performance. It was weird cause I’d come out as Elizabeth five days before but didn’t want to change gender on them at the last minute. Probably could’ve but didn’t want to.
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