The other night I was at a bar for a gay night and a portion of the evening featured drag queens. As I watched, I was struck by how accepted drag is by liberals and progressives — people who will, without a second thought, call out things like blackface and yellowface, which are understood by most (frustratingly there are some who continue to need education on why blackface isn’t funny or ok) to be racist.
Why is drag any different? Really, I’m asking. It’s possible I’m missing something here…
To me it seems equivalent to cultural appropriation or the way in which white people have mocked black people, Asian people, Indigenous people, and pretty much every other race/ethnicity that isn’t theirs, under the guise of “performance” or “satire.” Why is it cute or funny or entertaining for men to mock women via drag? Why is it not considered to be a form of cultural appropriation, but with regard to gender? Why have progressives and mainstream feminists avoided critique of these performances, in large part?
I imagine that the defense of drag would include arguments that say this performance of femininity is so exaggerated that it doesn’t mock women so much as it mocks a cartoonish version of extreme femininity, but I’m unconvinced that turning women into extreme, cartoonish caricatures that are to be mocked is particularly progressive — rather, it feels regressive to me. There must be a reason women don’t do this to men — turning masculinity into entertainment or a joke, that is.
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Last year, a drag queen named Daytona Bitch was fired from a Toronto Pride event for a blackface performance in which, as Laura Kane reports, “she dressed up as Miss Cleo, a kitschy telephone psychic from the late ‘90s, complete with black face paint.”
“After tweeting photos of the costume, she received several outraged responses on social media from members of the LGBTQ community.” And rightly so. But where is the LGBTQ community on drag? Why is it understood that the appropriation of a marginalized ethnicity, race or culture is facilitated by white privilege and that it’s offensive, but not that the same arguments could be applied to a group of men (who benefit from male privilege) who appropriate femininity as a form of entertainment?
In a 2006 paper, entitled “Imitating Others As Control: Is Drag Sexist/Racist?” Kirsten Anderberg writes:
“When men dress in drag and supposedly imitate women, it is most often very sexist in a remarkably similar way to the whites imitating racial minorities… All the things I have shunned as part of the ancient ‘cult of womanhood,’ all the superficial, commercialized, and fake aspects of ‘femininity’ that I have fought to be freed from, these men were embracing as their ‘womanhood!’ Tons of make up, huge dyed bouffant hair-dos, binding lingerie, heels, nylons, shaving…and these men in drag who were supposedly acting like women, also acted giddy, stupid, shallow…it is odd to me that this could be seen as anything but blatant sexism.”
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To be clear, I don’t think that drag queens are all intentionally working to subordinate women (but who knows, I’ve never asked any), nor do I think your enjoyment of drag performances (if you do indeed enjoy them) make you a necessarily Bad and Wrong, misogynist person. But I do think that the unwillingness of the LGTBQ community and mainstream feminism to talk about drag as something that is no more acceptable than any other kind of cultural appropriation or than white people’s efforts to turn ethnicity and race into a stereotype and a joke, is significant.
After Daytona Bitch was fired, Toronto Prides’ executive director Kevin Beaulieu said about the performance: “It doesn’t meet our mission or our mandate, which is to celebrate the full diversity of Toronto’s LGBTQ community.” The statement begs the question: where are women in that “celebration” of “diversity?” Do we matter at all? Or are we just a joke?
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