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Drag is considered an art form, particularly of performance art.

file:///C:/Users/juani/Downloads/9781118896877.wbiehs122.pdf

sisters: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/30/an-order-of-queer-and-trans-nuns-in-san-francisco-take-on-an-unholy-year

Although drag culture is an evolution of the cross-dressing male and female impersonator acts popularized in the early 20th century, the modern-day drag scene includes artists that perform as drag queens or drag kings regardless of their gender identity.

Definitions

The meanings of various categories related to drag, cross-dressing, and transgender identity may vary widely across individuals and communities.

Dependent on the observer, drag queens in Western society are seen as representing an array of often contradictory cultural values, limitations and possibilities, including: "fearless urban street fighters" at the Stonewall riots; failed men and symbolic representatives of the stigma associated with all gay men; transgendered provocateurs of dichotomous notions of gender; apt proponents of queer politics; gender-fuckers and gender-anarchists; gender royalists and aspirants to masculine power; and ultimately misogynists.

Although the they are often conflated in popular cultural representations, drag is differentiated from the notions of "cross-dressing" and "transvestism" in that its motivation is typically not sexual. Writing for the Encyclopædia Britannica, Colin Edward Carman noted that: "Unlike the secrecy of cross-dressing, in which the attempt is often to pass as a woman, dragging involves performance whereby the intent is an undoing of gender norms through doing (or dressing) the part of the opposite sex."

In 2004, American sociologist Judith Lorber defined drag in the following terms:

Drag's core elements are performance and parody. Drag exaggerates gendered dress and mannerisms with enough little incongruities to show the "otherness" of the drag artist. In the exaggeration lies the parody. Drag is performance because it needs an audience to appreciate the underlying joke. The joke is that a man can be a woman or a woman a man convincingly enough that the "unmasking"—or "unwigging"—at the end of the performance gives a pleasurable frisson and evokes laughter, even though the audience has been in on the joke from the beginning. (They have come to see a drag act, after all.)

The laughter is the giveaway. A joke is being played out. What is the joke in drag? Not that someone can pass convincingly as a member of the opposite gender–transgenders and permanent cross-dressers do not want to be unmasked. The joke in drag is to set up "femininity" or "masculinity" as pure performance, as exaggerated gender display—and then to cut them down as pretense after all.

In 2020, MasterClass defined drag as: "a gender-bending art form in which a person dresses in clothing and makeup meant to exaggerate a specific gender identity, usually of the opposite sex."

Writing for i-D, Jake Hall noted that drag is "most commonly defined as the exaggerated performance of gender norms — it's about 'performing' gender identity in order to highlight its instability."

A common misconception is the association between drag and transgender people, mainly that the artist wants to be the gender they are performing as.

Characteristics

According to Carman, the three typical basic components of doing drag are the adoption of a stage name, over-the-top characterization and making the fluidity of gender visible through performance.

Although drag is commonly associated with gay men performing as drag queens, modern-day drag scenes can be more inclusive by also giving the stage to drag kings (mostly women dressing as men), non-binary people and women, both trans and cisgender. Cisgender drag queens are sometimes called "faux queens" or "bio [biological] queens", although some consider these terms to be outdated and offensive.

History

See also: History of cross-dressing

Antecedents

Actor Edward Kynaston, one of the last "boy players" of English Restoration theatre.

Female impersonation realistically began when clothing started to take on gendered meanings in cultures as a form of cross-dressing behavior, and cross-dressing figures are found in the mythology of all the earliest known cultures, many of which held festivals and rituals to celebrate such behavior. Females who cross-dressed throughout history often did so to undertake behaviors and pursuits allowed only of men, with Joan of Arc being one of the most famous examples. On the other hand, historical accounts of male cross-dressers often portray such individuals as undertaking the behavior for erotic purposes—an early form of the contemporary transvestic fetishism—and losing status for doing so. Nevertheless, some cultures created special "third gender" categories, such as the winkte, bote, and nadle found by the European colonizers of North America; and the hijras of present-day India, wherein cross-dressing individuals were, and still are, widely accepted and, in some cases, held in high regard.

As male cross-dressing, drag has a long theatrical history, since many cultures have prohibited women on the professional stage and boys or men have played female parts. For example, in England, men (often boy players) playing women's roles became an institutionalized mainstay of the Elizabethan theatre of the early 1600s, and made possible the emergence of the professional female impersonator.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/history-drag-queens-rupaul-race-evolution-gay-rights/

Origins

American entertainer Julian Eltinge c. 1912, a foundational figure of the modern-day drag queen.

Although the act of cross-dressing has a long history, artists that we would now call drag performers were chiefly forged in the 18th and 19th centuries, as gender roles became increasingly rigid and cross-dressing thus acquired a distinctly provocative identity, allowing commentary on the constructs of gender and sexuality.

New York City and San Francisco had popular drag scenes as early as the late 19th century.

Early descriptions in existing literary sources placed the first manifestations of drag queens, akin to their modern-day instantiations, in England of the early 1700s.

The contemporary drag queen, often associated with the gay bar or nightclub, can perhaps trace her origin back to the "molly-houses" found in London in the 1700s and directly to drag balls held in Europe and then the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Rather than performing as seductive, camp, or tragic women—as in drag shows today—these molly-house performers acted out marriages or births, suggesting both ironic distance from and desire for new modern form of domesticity based on romantic love.

The first person known to describe himself as "the queen of drag" was William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Hancock, Maryland, who in the 1880s started hosting drag balls in Washington, DC attended by other men who were formerly enslaved, and often raided by the police, as documented in the newspapers. In 1896, Swann was convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail on the false charge of "keeping a disorderly house" (euphemism for running a brothel) and requested a pardon from the president for holding a drag ball (the request was denied).

Early 20th century entertainer Pepi Littman, considered a pioneer of the modern-day drag king.

In his 2019 book Drag: Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business, Frank DeCaro cites vaudeville performer Julian Eltinge as one of the founding figures of the modern drag artform.

The earliest appearances of gay female impersonators in America recorded in the literature happened at masquerade balls held in New York City in the early 20th century, which allowed individuals to connect and to engage in same-sex courtship without being directly exposed to social sanctions.

Drag king history is much less known to the general public compared to drag queens. A pioneering figure for the drag king scene was early 20th century Yiddish "male impersonator" Pepi Littman, whose representation of Jewish identity is still a rarity in today's drag. Another pioneering drag king was Hetty King, an English performer from the 1900s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT15sCRHKJU

1920s—1930s: The Pansy Craze

Several artists have historically created work that might not be considered or intended to be "drag", but nonetheless similarly challenged social and sexual archetypes; for example, Marcel Duchamp had a female alter ego in the 1920s named Rrose Sélavy, who appeared in several portraits taken by photographer Man Ray. Likewise, artist Claude Cahun was the male alter ego of Lucie Schwob, who took self-portraits dressed in male garments and is now regarded as a forerunner to contemporary feminist artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, among others, who have incorporated elements of drag in their work.

Gender impersonation and the history of drag is said to have entwined with gay culture around the 1930s, as queer people used underground clubs and speakeasies as an opportunity to express themselves and form their own subculture.

In the early 1930s, there were several recorded instances of "public disturbances" involving female impersonators parading through the streets of New York City.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/14/pansy-craze-the-wild-1930s-drag-parties-that-kickstarted-gay-nightlife

1940s—1960s

Out of the underground gay social networks of the early 20th century, predominately gay neighborhoods progressively emerged and gay-only communities were well on their way to consolidation by the 1960s.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of "drag queen" in 1941.

During the McCarthy era, gay people were purged from government jobs, and gay establishments were subjected to intense police surveillance and raiding, and the risk was aggravated for gender nonconformists such as drag queens. According to American anthropologists Michael Moncrieff and Pierre Lienard, it was during this postwar period that drag queens emerged as significant players in the gay community, and noted that many of the female impersonators who became prominent in the 1950s and 1960s were from very poor backgrounds. In the 1960s, they became very visible during the violence opposing police and gay communities in both San Francisco and New York City.

In the 1950s, drag became associated with the LGBT community and as a gay art form with the introduction of bars catered for gay people.

Anthropologist Esther Newton, who conducted fieldwork among New York City's female impersonators in the 1960s—when the term "drag queen" became known—contrasted female impersonators as "stage impersonators" with the drag queens as "street impersonators, who are never off-stage", defining the latter as: "The homosexual term for transvestite is 'drag queen'. 'Queen' is a generic noun for any homosexual man. 'Drag' can be used as an adjective or a noun. As a noun it means the clothing of one sex when worn by the other sex". At the time, drag queens were "underdogs", being stigmatised in the majority society as well as in the gay subculture, as they "represented the stigma of the gay world." An example of this discrimination from both sides was that of Flawless Sabrina—one of the first publicly known drag queens, who had been the clandestine organizer of pageants all over the U.S. since 1959—who was arrested three times in 1968 for being dressed in drag when promoting her award-winning movie The Queen in Times Square. Due to The Queen's success at the Cannes Film Festival, Flawless appeared in drag in national TV talk shows, upsetting both straight and gay people, who saw showing up as a drag queen in public as anti-social behaviour. Flawless herself recounted: "I was hardly to belong together with Andy Warhol [who had helped finance The Queen] or any of those stars. I was very much a weed in that garden, because at the end of the day there was still a very high anti-social aspect to what I did. It was not acceptable. Even in the most sophisticated circles, it was frowned upon."

1970s

The change brought by the Stonewall riots and the gay liberation movement was the essential precondition for the evolution of the later drag queen and transgender subcultures and the drag queens' move into mainstream business in the following decades.

During the 1970s, drag queens managed to establish themselves in the various subcultures that were emerging at the time, in glam rock and disco and later in punk rock.

A pioneering drag act in Australia were Sylvia and the Synthetics https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/26/acid-blood-and-police-raids-the-pioneering-drag-chaos-of-sylvia-and-the-synthetics

https://archive.org/details/drag12unse/page/n1/mode/2up

https://www.sfchronicle.com/promotions/article/The-Cockettes-at-50-exploring-the-SF-15560443.php

1980s—1992

In downtown Manhattan, the drag culture of the 1980s was strongly associated with certain clubs, especially the Pyramid Club in the East Village, where drag queens mixed several different styles in their performances while continuing the wild and fierce character of 1970s "gender fuck" drag. The punks, drag queens and other "outrageous" people that met at night in the bars and clubs also stayed together during the daytime in the streets, and especially in Tompkins Square Park. In 1984, the Wigstock festival took place for the first time, born from the idea to bring the Pyramid Club's drag performances out into the daylight in the Park. While in 1985 a thousand people attended Wigstock, by the early 1990s it had become an annual festival attracting several tens of thousands and was officially called "Wigstock Day" by Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger.

1993—2009: Increased media attention

In 1993, African American drag queen RuPaul gained success as a singer, performer and model after the music video for "Supermodel (You Better Work)" appeared on MTV; but was only the most famous of a group of New York City drag queens that became the focus of international media hype at that time. Over the next years, drag queens came to prominence both as members of emerging subcultures and as single performers in the capitals and big cities of many countries in Europe, Asia, South America and even in Polynesia. Writing for the Frobenius Institute in 2005, researcher Carsten Balzer dubbed this phenomenon the "great drag queen hype", a reference to 1980 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Taking advantage of this "drag queen hype" of the 1990s, RuPaul gained the status of a worldwide "drag icon".

The 1990s also brought drag kings into the spotlight as female performers gained more popularity as well as their own balls.

2016—present: The "golden age" of drag

American drag queen Sasha Velour in 2018.

Cross-culturally, drag queens are now found in gay communities throughout the Western world, and the phenomenon has also appeared in regions where gay individuals face important social or legal persecution such as in Moscow, Jerusalem and parts of Africa. Other cross-cultural examples such as the Khwaja Sira of Pakistan or the Fa'afafine of Samoa share similarities to drag queens, although those cultural manifestations have their respective specificities that differentiate them from the modern-day Western drag queen phenomenon.

In recent times, the character of drag has changed immensely, particularly because the greater awareness of transgender women has made it less common for drag queens to attempt to attempt to pass as a woman; thus drag has come to draw on more exaggerated looks that make it clear that the performer is indeed a drag queen and not a cisgender or transgender woman.

Since the late 2010s, drag has been enjoying one of its most popular periods in history, with writers reporting that it had entered the mainstream due to the growing success of TV show RuPaul's Drag Race, which first aired in 2009. This prompted The New York Times to declare in 2018 the emergence of a "golden age of drag", as RuPaul's Drag Race has launched the careers of hundreds of drag queens and resulted in the emergence of lucrative sub-industries, such as wig and cosmetics lines; as well as managers, publicists and assistants helping these "brand-new celebrities".

In 2020, Brazilian artist Uyra Sodoma became the first drag queen to appear on the cover any Vogue publication.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/fashion/why-the-fashion-world-is-obsessed-with-rupauls-drag-race.html

As part of LGBT culture

Drag has been key for the gay community since the emergence of the latter in the early modern period.

In a 1992 research book on cross-dressing, professor Marjorie Garber noted that: "The story of transvestism in western culture is in fact, [...] bound up with the story of homosexuality and gay identity, from 'drag' and 'voguing' to fashion and stage design, from the boy actors of the English Renaissance stage to Gertrude Stein and Divine. No analysis of 'cross-dressing' that wants to interrogate the phenomenon seriously from a cultural, political, or even aesthetic vantage point can fail to take into account the foundational role of gay identity and gay style."

Contemporary influence

Many of the makeup techniques developed by drag performers over the years have been incorporated into modern-day beauty and fashion trends, most notably contouring, but also overlining lips.

Politics and academia

"... the reasons why men undertook playing female roles and the cultural meaning attached to their activities has varied considerably over history. They have both reflected and sustained men's images of what a women is, or should be, and other important cultural values of the given society, and in this sense, are very much symbols of the politics of the times."

– Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood, 2004..

The political effects of drag have been much debated, with many writers seeing the glamour drag of "femme queens" as a replication of the fetishistic objectification of women they find in the media. As noted by Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp: "One of the burning questions about drag queens among both scholars and audiences is whether they are more gender-revolutionaries than gender-conservatives."

Feminist scholars have traditionally argued that drag is inherently a misogynistic act, primarily because it represents a mockery of women or, at the very least, a highly stereotyped image of femininity and womanhood. For instance, radical feminist Janice Raymond wrote in her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire that: "There have been pleas from some feminist commentators to recognize that cross dressing, drag, and transvestism are on a continuum of masculinity and to sympathize with these ways in which some men are deviating from acceptable masculine gender behavior. [...] That some men may find gender relief, sexual pleasure, and/or stardom and financial profit in this mimicry does nothing to challenge the political power of the normative, dominant, powerful class of men that the male gender bender still belongs to. [...] The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and 'drag' enables them to objectify their own bodies." Several writers focusing on camp drag argue that its ironic distance on a parodied femininity can be compared to the racism of blackface minstrelsy.

However, the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s has resulted in criticism of the misogynistic interpretation of drag, not only because it views forms of transgender behavior as male homosexual activities, but also because it places women at the center of male homosexuality. Many of these scholars argue that drag is a highly subversive act that deconstructs traditional assumptions concerning gender identity, and praise drag queens for demonstrating that gender displays do not necessarily correlate with anatomical sex. For example, gender theorist Judith Butler argues that drag exposes the imitative nature of gender, showing that gender is an "imitation without an origin". Professor Rusty Barrett noted that: "Rather than viewing drag as an imitation of women, queer theorists usually glorify it as a highly political deconstructive force working to undermine gender assumptions." The most important claim about the politics of drag since the 1990s is that it exemplifies Butler's idea of "gender performativity". Carole-Anne Tyler explained:

For Butler, all gender is drag, and drag denaturalizes gender by exposing it as the citation of culturally variable norms with no reference to anything authentic or essential. Butler thus inverts the claim of sex and gender theory that some aspects of gender are natural, determined by biological sex, while others are contingent, arguing instead that biological sex itself is the effect of the gender signs that conjure it as a cause, a regulatory fiction that sustains heteronormativity.

Culture

Jargon

Among African American drag queens, the term fierce is used to denote something that "is so exceptionally stylish or impressive that it draws attention." They also use the word pee when something is done skillfully; for example, a drag queen "pees" if she persistently performs exceptionally wel. The term fish refers to women, and if a drag queen is referred to as "real fish" it means that she could pass as a woman.

Subcultures

Although regarded as a gay subculture by itself, the drag queen phenomenon includes several distinct "(sub-)subcultures", such as "glam queens" (who project a sophisticated, upper-class image), "trash queens" or "clown queens" (who perform comic routines and dress in exaggerated costumes), and "street queens" (who work primarily in prostitution and "dress accordingly").

Ball culture

Main article: Ball culture

From the early 20th century, some gay communities in the United States, where cross-dressing on the streets was illegal, developed a drag ball culture.

https://ezratemko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/A-history-of-drag-balls-houses-and-the-culture-of-voguing.pdf

Club Kids

Main article: Club Kids

Pageantry

Main article: Drag pageantry

See also

• Gay Shame
• List of drag kings
• List of drag queens
• Trans-exclusionary radical feminism
• Travesti (gender identity)

Bibliography

• Baker, Roger (1995). Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-1254-1. Retrieved July 16, 2021.
• Barrett, Rusty (2017). From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195390186.
• Brennan, Niall; Gudelunas, David, eds. (2017). RuPaul's Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture: The Boundaries of Reality TV. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-50618-0.
• Drysdale, Kerryn (May 24, 2019). Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures: The Rise and Fall of a Lesbian Social Scene. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3030157760. Retrieved July 21, 2021.
• Ferdman, Bertie; Stokic, Jovana, eds. (2020). The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art. Methuen. ISBN 978-1350057579. Retrieved July 19, 2021.
• Garber, Marjorie (1992). Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Routledge. ISBN 9780415919517.
• Magnus, Hastings (May 17, 2016). Why Drag?. Foreword by Boy George. Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-1-4521-4897-7. Retrieved July 16, 2021.
• Senelick, Laurence (2005) [2000]. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Routledge. ISBN 0-203-41107-2.
• Schacht, Steven P.; Underwood, Lisa, eds. (2004). The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators. Routledge. ISBN 9781560232858.

External links

• DragQueenMerch, official website
• The Stonewall Inn, official website