Is Drag Degrading to Women?
Dictionary.com defines a drag queen as “A male who dresses as a woman and impersonates female characteristics for public entertainment”, and in the book, The Drag Queen Anthology, Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood define drag queens as “individuals who publicly perform being women in from of an audience that knows they are ‘men’.” The performance art of cross dressing as women started in a subculture of queer nightlife. It has strong roots in the transgender community as way for men struggling with their identity to perform gender without backlash from mainstream culture. Now, with mainstream media becoming more and more accepting of a full spectrum of gender being performed in day to day life, being a drag queen takes on a more theatrical, comedic and/or artistic role in entertainment.
With the heightened popularity of rupaul’s drag race and it’s inclusion in mainstream entertainment, drag as both an art and form of entertainment has become subjected to scrutiny. On the radical side, Mary Cheney argues that drag is the same thing as black face.
Cross dressing and lip-syncing is entirely different from the insensitive nature and intention of blackface. In queer and feminist communities, drag tends to be widely accepted. It makes sense, counter cultures allowing each other to thrive and experiment. It is the concept of “gender roles” that forces us to so closely associate femininity with women, so when someone who is clearly not a woman performs femininity, it is still thought of to be a reflection on women. A lot of drag queens get their names and character traits from pop culture, and the media loves to portray women as, to use Mary Cheney’s words, bitchy, catty, dumb, and slutty. Indeed, these are not great attributes for a person to embody, so when drag queens perform those characteristics while dressed and made up like a woman, it could be read as disrespectful or an insult to woman. Drag queens also tend to be hyper sexual, sometimes with a crude sense of humor. When people over sexualize femininity, it dehumanizes women by turning them into an object of sex as opposed to a complex human being. Many supporters of drag culture argue that the femininity being performed by drag queens is their own form of self expression and has little to do with people who live their daily lives as women. Judith Butler argues that traditional gender roles are exhaustingly heteronormative, and that they attempt to define a norm that gives a sense of “otherness” to queer culture and drag. If we broaden our lense to not view heterosexuality as “having a claim on naturalness and originality” (Butler 384), gender can be scene as a performance for everyone and therefore not so different from drag. Basically, most people view drag as an imitation, but that implies that gender has a norm in which to deviate from. It’s like personality, there isn’t a set way to be an individual, so there isn’t a set way to be feminine.
I want to bring up art history in this exploration of gender because drag so connected with self expression and the artistry around makeup and fashion. Drag is an experiment gender, makeup, performance, fashion, comedy, parody etc… There is a million different ways to “do” drag, as seen by the assortment of characters who have won RuPaul’s drag race all with varying intensities in the femininity of the character.
Throughout art history, it was common for male artists to use women as inspiration for their art form, yet barr them from participating in the creation of the art and having a say in how they were being depicted. John Berger of the BBC puts forth the idea that women exist in art to viewed, and that the image being viewed was created by men. Throughout history, women have had no say in things that affect them, like not being able to vote or chose who they marry. Women are part of a system without having created the system, so they don’t benefit from it. When considering people’s relationship with femininity, we have to consider what we as culture think of it. As a patriarchal society, we exist in a system created by men for men, involving the dominance of men and subversion of women (Carol P. Christ).
We don’t value feminine ideals and in many cases we don’t respect them, so when we see drag queens performing stereotypes that we consider to be about women, we either understand and enjoy the exaggeration or we are confronted by the insulting connotations people associate women with.
Do drag queens really believe performing femininity boils down to wearing heels, eyebrows up to their hairline and hyper sexual dance moves? Probably not, that might just be how that person wants to act that night or who they want to parody. Beyonce performs her gender with stilettos and sexual dance moves, but Hillary Clinton doesn’t, and they are still both female. What it really boils down to is that there are different ways to perform gender and none are more legitimate. While I believe everyone has a claim to femininity, women have been disrespected for so long by different forms of media and art, it’s important to consider the intentions of picking and choosing what you want to perform about certain people.
“There must be a reason women don’t do this to men — turning masculinity into entertainment or a joke, that is. Why is it funny for men to dress up”
There is still pressure for women to look and act a certain way, so I think drag characters meant to parody women should be approached with a level of sensitivity as well as creativity. There are a million of different ways to be viewed as a woman, so an art form inspired by women should reflect that.
