The following is the final paper I wrote last semester for the Queer Studies class I took at the University of Iowa. While the original assignment was to choose a current event of interest and apply course readings to analyze it, my professor presented me with a specific challenge to consider instead: is it a form of cultural appropriation if a cisgender woman performs drag? Of course, I immediately chose this option and this is the result. I have plans for further refinement, to better join the academic conversation about drag and drag culture. I have a decent stack of further research to do, so please enjoy this as a work in progress.
Boys’ (who dress like girls) Club: whose femininity and whose stage?
The art of drag has been a staple of gay culture for decades. Currently, drag holds significant space within popular culture and a rising number of drag queens have achieved cult celebrity status. This escalating popularity has transported drag out of the backs of dark gay bars to the stages of large theaters, television screens, countless YouTube channels, and all over Instagram and other social media outlets. Drag and drag queens occupy an expanding space in culture and this has catalyzed a debate over who exactly can and should perform the art, notably over cisgender women’s inclusion in the art. Drag as a performance or parody of gender originates in gay male culture which leads many to declare “cultural appropriation” at the thought of a cisgender woman participating (Pagan 2017). Is a cisgender woman donning drag make-up and exaggerated costume, lip syncing and performing on stage appropriation of gay male culture? Utilizing sociological, queer, and theatrical scholarship, as well as items from popular online media outlets, I argue that the underlying assertion that cisgender women have no right to the art of drag is inherently misogynist and undercuts the revolutionary foundation that drag’s current popularity rests upon. While the question of gay cultural appropriation remains complicated, cisgender gay men should not be afforded exclusive gatekeeping rights to drag, as male drag queens’ themselves appropriate femininity and images of womanhood for the purposes of their drag performances.
Historically, drag queens have been seen as representations of an array of disparate and, at times, contradictory cultural values and possibilities (Schacht and Underwood 2004). Drag can be seen as symbolically representing the stigma of feminized gay masculinity, post-modern gender bending, or reification of the gender binary by exploiting gender stereotypes – sometimes all at once. It would be remiss to not acknowledge that contemporary drag performance has its roots in the historical prohibition of women from public theatrical performances, which dictated that men or boys play the roles of women (Schacht and Underwood 2004). Historically, drag has also been synonymous with the concept of “female impersonation,” with which achieving the illusion of a biological (re: cisgender) woman was the goal. “Impersonation” goes beyond simple dress or even make-up, though, as it involves taking on an actual persona and convincing an audience of an illusory reality. It is this history that has solidified the concept of drag being defined as performers dressed as the opposite sex, caricaturing gender stereotypes (Merriam-Webster 2018). The operative term in this definition is opposite. How can a cisgender woman perform as a drag queen if she already lives as a woman? What does she have to offer in terms of performance if she is impersonating something that she already is? These questions reveal the sexist core of the argument to bar women from drag: the assertion that drag only exists in a binary world of two opposing genders, in which one side can only perform or parody the other.
Drag at the end of the 20th century presented possibility for subversion of gender norms, as well as symbolic representation of the ways in which these norms are reproduced (Butler 2004). With this in mind, the face value of a cisgender male dressing in exaggerated women’s clothing and make-up would appear to be more revolutionary, as the breaking of gender norms usually comes at the cost of negative social sanctions (West and Zimmerman 1987). It is here that the argument of cultural appropriation comes into play. In an opinion piece published by The Odyssey Online, journalist Nicole Olivieri Pagan states, “when cis women perform as drag queens, they are dipping their feet into the performance of it, this being the positive experience, without receiving any of the backlash of stepping out of their gender norms and being discriminated against for it,” (2017). Pagan goes on to state that appropriation is a form of discrimination because it is theft from someone outside of a culture, implying that a cisgender woman performing in drag is “stealing” something that plays a specific role for LGBT people. It is important to note that Pagan does not explicitly state that drag is owned by gay men alone and that it is part of wider “LGBT culture.” It can be read as implying gay men specifically, but that is not the structure of the argument in play.
There is a lot to unpack from Pagan’s assertions. While I acknowledge that this is an opinion-based “think piece,” this line of thinking is riddled with problematic assumptions, the most significant of which is that the cis women in question have no place in the so described “LGBT culture.” Pagan’s article was a reaction to encountering a profile published on i-d.vice.com of several London-based female drag queens[1], one of which whose picture was appropriated as a click-bait style header for the piece. Taking the time to read the profile in question leads you to a more in-depth video profile done by Broadly, another subsidiary of Vice Media, focused on the experiences of women and LGBT individuals. When explaining why she does drag, the queen pictured in the article’s header, Victoria Sin, states:
Everybody performs their gender, especially in terms of being women. You perform everyday as woman. I think when I’m in drag I kind of exercise having an entitlement to the space that I’m in and commanding people to kind of, like, look at me and to be in all of me. It’s powerful. (Broadly 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYaq_XnjaQ&
feature=youtu.be)
For her, gender is performed by all people and women in particular have high expectations in this respect. She sees herself as performing as a woman in her daily life and drag allows her the ability to play with the expected performance and assert greater control and entitlement to space around her, something not afforded to women to the same extent as men in wider culture.
The video continues with Victoria’s voice narrating over interchanging images of her out of drag talking to the camera and images of her walking the streets of London in drag. Her drag look involves exaggerated make-up with overdrawn lips and dramatic, almost clown-like eyebrows, large false eyelashes, a stacked blonde crimped wig, and a form fitting blue skirt and top that accentuate her curves. The viewer can see that she’s added shading to her chest to accentuate her cleavage and she stands about four inches taller in her black platform heels. Her narration explains that she comes from a traditional Chinese family in which she was raised to focus on her looks and suitability as a wife, as opposed to her brother who was raised to follow his dreams and be strong. She explains that after coming out as queer, she found herself in gay bars and clubs experiencing drag shows for the first time. Amazed at the display of gender play, Victoria states, “shit, I want to be that in charge of my own kind of, like, femininity, you know, how can I do that?” (Broadly 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYaq_XnjaQ&featu
re=youtu.be). Had Pagan taken the time to seek this video out or even speak to a cis woman who performs drag in person, more nuance to the subject of her critique could have been discovered.
To assert that Victoria does not belong in gay space because she is a cisgender woman who performs in drag both silences her queer identity and marginalizes her as a woman of color in the LGBT community, of which she has rightful membership to. Here the issue becomes two-fold: who does drag as a performance art belong to and who does femininity, specifically the ability to play with femininity belong to? To assert that women have no right to play with forms of femininity is ignorant at best and misogynist at worst. While Pagan might not have intended to erase the identities of the women she was criticizing, her article amounts to shortsighted finger-pointing when the context in which these queens perform is actually realized. Even when cisgender women’s participation in drag is acknowledged, they are marginalized through terminology, garnering labels such as “bio-queens” or “faux-queens.” While some performers might identify with these terms, Victoria speaks to the issue in saying: “I think it’s, like, totally bullshit. I think it’s a way of othering women who do drag and want to participate,” (Broadly 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYaq_XnjaQ&feature=youtu.be). Another queen featured in the video, Lolo Brow, espouses similar sentiment stating that she rejects “faux-queen” in particular because she doesn’t like being told anything she is doing is false. This othering recreates the marginalization perpetuated by Pagan in her article and it also reifies the notion that the only “authentic” drag can be performed by cisgender men because they are performing something opposite of themselves.
Victoria gives specific detail of the othering she has experienced performing drag in her local scene:
In your typical gay bar, if you present them with a female drag queen they just wouldn’t think it was legitimate and the worst misogyny that I’ve encountered has been in gay spaces. Basically, looking me in the eye and telling me, you know, I hate you because you’re a woman and this is not your space and you don’t belong here, you know. (Broadly 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=VJYaq_XnjaQ&feature
=youtu.be)
The question of belonging and ownership again surfaces in this narrative. She calls her experience misogyny, stating that her gender has been used as grounds for exclusion from a gay space – a space to which she can rightfully claim as her own as a queer woman. Hostility directed at a woman participating in performance art about playing with concept of femininity and womanhood is, I argue, problematic. In fact, taken a step further and bringing back the fact that drag has its roots in the historical exclusion of women from the theater, I would go as far as to declare it as particularly ludicrous, especially given the myriad of ways many male drag performers participate various forms of appropriation of their own, all on the foundation of society’s derision of the feminine. This exclusion conjures images of Wittman’s (1997) marginalization of lesbians and women in the gay movement of the 1970s, asserting that gay men have “opted out” of a gender system that oppresses women because of their sexual orientation. The ability to play with forms of femininity does not rest solely in the hands of men. While gay men experience the very real consequences of effeminacy being seen as failure of masculinity (Connell 1987; 2005), these consequences are rooted in society’s marginalization and hatred of women, which is something that is lost in the argument for the exclusion of women from drag.
Regarding the question of who drag belongs to, the entirety of the context must be considered. While drag and drag queens now occupy ample cultural space outside of the stages of gay clubs, the spirit of the art of drag is still rooted in performance, or at least the potential for performance. Gender is still largely assumed to be an ascribed status set at birth, but seen through a sociological lens, gender exists in the world of achievement. Gender should be understood as an accomplishment, achieved situationally and carried out in the virtual or real presence of others equally invested in the maintenance of the current larger system of gender (West and Zimmerman 1987). This taken alongside the dramaturgy of the rest of social life (Goffman 1959), gender can absolutely be declared as “performative.” The majority of aspects of our personal identities are performative in some way and social actors consciously make choices throughout all social interactions to communicate particular ideas of who they are (Goffman 1959). It is to the performance that manifests on the stage of a drag show that we must look to further assess this issue of ownership and, ultimately, the claims of cultural appropriation waged at those declared as crossing boundaries.
Theater scholars acknowledge the stage as a mirror that reflects cultural and social organization (Dolan 1985). Dolan (1985) acknowledges how the avant-garde has shifted this reflection, questioning the assumed accuracy and the shift toward an unstable, non-unified self on stage. In the context of drag, a performance happens for a variety of reasons, from entertainment to revolutionary protest, all centered on the premise that the performer on stage has choreographed something around the predication of gender as illusory, parody, or play. However, the purpose of and resulting structure of said performance should be taken into account as well. In a survey of previous drag scholarship, Schacht and Underwood (2004) call attention to how many female impersonators[2] use their drag personas as a means for doing masculinity, in which, “images of the feminine are merely the real estate upon which many drag queens do status and power,” (9). They note hearing queens in numerous settings declare that they make better women than “real women.”
In a similar vein, Berkowitz and Belgrave (2010) explore how drag queens in Miami Beach manipulate aspects of femininity and employ nuanced strategies to negotiate their contradictory status as gay men ostracized by their sexuality and celebrated drag performers, all with the goal of earning money and achieving situational power. In this study, identity work emerges as a link between marginalization and rewards, suggesting that the performance art involved is less on the revolutionary side of the spectrum. While the authors acknowledge that this is a singular case study of a particular group of queens, this example highlights how some gay men use drag to manipulate aspects of femininity for the means of earning status and income. Relatedly, Schacht and Underwood ‘s (2004) survey concludes:
Hegemonic masculinity is apparently so pervasive that any activity a man might pursued, including those most associated with the feminine and women, he is by default seen as more competent and superior to a woman undertaking the same activity… and thus deserved of more status and power for his efforts. (9)
In this case, the stage does, in fact, mirror larger cultural ideas, even despite the avant-garde potential of drag. This assessment paired with the observation that in drag shows, performers would continually call attention that the fact that despite their dress and make-up, they were still men. This leads to the ultimate conclusion that in this sense, actually being a drag queen often seems to be about achieving and experiencing masculinity more than being effeminate (Schacht and Underwood 2004).
The question of cultural appropriation still remains. Returning to the case of Victoria Sin: when donning drag make-up and performing as her constructed drag persona, is she appropriating gay culture that does not belong to her? Were the gay men telling her that she did not belong in their space right in doing so, even despite her queer identity? Cultural appropriation is technically defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, technologies, or genres by members of a different culture (Rogers 2006). As defined in the world of the arts, it can take various specific subtypes, such as “content appropriation,” “style appropriation,” or “subject appropriation,” all of which could be applicable to drag performance. Appropriation of content involves the reuse of an idea expressed in works outside of another culture, appropriation of style involves taking inspiration from another culture to perform in a similar style, and subject appropriation involves an outside representing their work as an individual from another culture (Young 2008; Young and Brunk 2009). The appropriation that Pagan accuses cisgender women who perform in drag evokes elements of all three described subtypes, most notably that of subject appropriation. According to her argument, because they were born female, these women have no right to ownership of drag as an art form. They are “outsiders” and by claiming the title of “drag queen” and performing in drag, they are posing as members of a gay male culture they are not a part of.
As stated before, this accusation of appropriation, specifically subject appropriation is predicated on the assumption that the women in question do not belong in any way within the LGBT community (re: they are assumed to be both heterosexual and cisgender, doubling their status as outsiders). Schacht (2002) explains that in a society that often marginalizes gay men, drag contexts can provide safe havens to realize feelings of affirmation, interpersonal power, and self-esteem. He also concludes that the queens he studied are far from “gender anarchists” and cannot realistically subvert larger structures of gender as their performances are still enacted within a dichotomous framework with which, “images of the feminine are still employed to realize male dominance,” (Schacht 2002: 174). I argue that cis gay men’s policing of the ownership and authenticity of drag stands as a direct extension of this male dominance and mirrors larger culture’s devaluation of femininity that much of drag purports to be a direct reaction to. I would go as far as to say that when comparing the motives of queens explored by Schacht (2002) and Schacht and Underwood (2004) to those expressed by the women who perform drag featured by Broadly, any accusations of appropriation should be directed at the male drag queens of the former studies who have utilized femininity as a means to reclaim hegemonic masculine power.
In many ways, cisgender gay male drag queens are celebrated for performing femininity in ways that cisgender women are condemned for in the context of larger society. This key point is lost when the alarm of cultural appropriation is sounded based on women drag queens’ gender (and often assumed sexual orientation and motives). In a response to Pagan’s original article, London-based drag queen China Dethcrash decries the growing backlash faced by women who perform drag. He calls attention to the belief that these women have it “easier” than men who perform drag by virtue of their (perceived) biology, as they supposedly don’t have to tuck, pad, or use make-up to feminize their face. He states, “I think that excuse merely distills drag down to simple female impersonation, when drag (British drag in particular) is a vast, fluctuating organism that swallows gender, and by codifying it in this way we’re placing it within some extremely small parameters,” (HISKIND Magazine 2016: https://hiskind.com/no-girls-allowed-examining-validity-bio-queen-role-queer-environments/). Here, drag is posited as something beyond imitation or impersonation. In this world of drag, the gender of the performer is not only less relevant but more open to interpretation. In China’s world of drag, queens like Victoria are both welcome and can be, in some ways, more revolutionary than their cisgender male counterparts participating in more traditional forms of the art.
Another blogger, Jake Hall, responding to Pagan’s article expresses similar sentiment, stating that gay men should not have the monopoly on an art form that prides itself on being disruptive. He takes it a step further and turns the critique on gay male culture: “it’s worth pointing out that, just like the rest of the world, ‘gay culture’ as a whole is still guilty of exacerbating various forms of oppression: there’s evidence that it is still deeply racist, misogynistic, transphobic and, paradoxically, rife with internalized homophobia… queer spaces can actually be particularly punishing for anybody who doesn’t fit certain standards,” (Dazed 2017: http://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/37963/1/why-do-some-people-want-to-stop-women-doing-drag?fbclid=IwAR2Gl9yu-De04QiQrggou-2Vu8zeIFYu7i_3_BJDSHNDkkWUX903Ep0mcsM). It is important to note that with each accusation, Hall provides links to other articles detailing gay men’s guilt with these various isms. The punishment mentioned has certainly been felt by the women who perform drag, as espoused by Victoria Sin and the rest of the queens featured by Broadly. Also, the charge of transphobia also brings an important issue to light: transgender women’s place in the drag world has also been contested, yet they are often afforded greater access to drag space and some occupy celebrity status alongside their cisgender male colleagues. This criticism is not directed toward transgender women who perform drag. Rather, it is directed at those who celebrate these women while simultaneously condemning cisgender women’s place in drag[3]. To celebrate a transgender woman’s drag while calling a cisgender woman’s drag illegitimate or appropriation is a veiled way of saying that the transgender woman in question is not actually a woman, making her drag more “valid.” This doubles down on the misogyny and reifies the misnomer that drag as an art form should only be performed by male bodies, even when there are no male bodies involved in an assessment such as this.
While the potential for true cultural appropriation is present when a cisgender woman performs in drag, it is not unique to her gender identity. As Hall espouses and Schacht (2002) confirms through academic study, gay male drag performers perpetrate cultural appropriation themselves. At the bottom line, drag’s roots in the historical exclusion of women and the reverence received by male drag queens for performing elements of femininity that would stigmatize women in wider culture signifies that perhaps the greater crime of appropriation is committed against women and not by them. In the conclusion of Broadly’s profile, Victoria states, “femininity does not belong to women and it doesn’t belong to men either,” (Broadly 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYaq_XnjaQ&feature=youtu.be). Though this has been said in the context of drag, this declaration is astute in terms of wider systems of gender in general. Femininity as a larger concept is a cultural construct that is not exclusive to any particular body. We live in a culture that assigns and expects it of those born female, all while systematically devaluing it. This devaluation of femininity is a primary motivating force behind the art of drag, but to exclude women and set the boundaries around who rightfully has access to this artistic opportunity creates a boys’ club akin to the heterosexual boys’ club that is hegemonic masculinity that many gay men find themselves excluded from. Put most simply, a blanket declaration that a cisgender woman performing drag and claiming the identity of “drag queen” is not in and of itself cultural appropriation. There could be a myriad of reasons that she pursues this art and to exclude her on the basis of her gender is an extension of wider culture’s misogyny and does disservice to the possibilities of contemporary drag as a form of performance art.
[1] One of which goes by “Edith Pilaf,” which, I argue, might be among the more superior and clever pun-based drag names currently in existence.
[2] Term used by the authors in the original publication.
[3] This comes from personal, embodied knowledge. No academic source could be found, but perhaps I should fill this gap in the literature with future drafts of this essay.
Works Cited
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All words © Jay Sorensen, 2019.
Jay Sorensen, Ph.D. Candidate 