Performative Tensions in Female Drag Performances

Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research Volume 12 Article 4 2013 Performative Tensions in Female Drag Performances Kathryn Hobson Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope Recommended Citation Hobson, Kathryn (2013) "Performative Tensions in Female Drag Performances," Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research: Vol. 12 , Article 4. Available at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope/vol12/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact . Performative Tensions in Female Drag Performances Kathryn Hobson, Ph.D. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Using an intersectional queer theory lens, I employ critical performance autoethnography to argue that female drag performances do the work of oppression and social justice simultaneously to question whether queer spaces are actually places of freedom and liberation. First, I explore existing literature of drag, female masculinities, and femme-drag performance; second, I detail intersectional queer theory and critical performance autoethnography; third, I offer my autoethnographic narrative from the site of a drag performance because it is imperative for problematizing female drag performance and the perpetuation of whiteness and misogyny in drag performance; finally, I offer remarks for further justification for intersectional analysis for female drag performance. Keywords: Intersectionality; Queer; Female Drag Performances; Sexuality; Whiteness In the vein of Bryant Alexander, “I begin with a confession” (Performing Black 100). I have often both dreaded and loved attending drag shows. Drag queen shows highlight my appreciation of perfect makeup, glamorous outfits, and killer calf muscles; while drag king shows titillate, excite, and anger me. As a white, queer cisgender,1 femme,2 theorizing through my performances of race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality, sometimes when I go to a drag show, where the boys look like girls, and the girls look like boys, I get all 1 According to Julia R. Johnson, “If one’s sex identity matches her/his morphology, then s/he is cissexual. If one’s gender identity aligns with sex morphology, s/he is said to be cisgender” (138). Whereas transgender is, “An umbrella term for persons who challenge gender normativity, which includes persons who identify as transfeminine, transmasculine, transsexual, Two-Spirit, cross-dresser, genderqueer, same-genderloving, in the life, female-to-male (FTM), male-to-female (MTF), intersex and more (138). 2 Drawing on Brushwood and Camilleri, I define femme, “As ‘femininity gone wrong’— bitch, slut, nag, whore, cougar, dyke, or brazen hussy…. Femininity is a demand placed on female bodies and femme is the danger of a body read female or inappropriately feminine” (13). An earlier version of this paper was awarded with the 2011 Top Paper Award for the Performance Studies Division at the Western States Communication Association Convention. The author would like to thank Bernadette Marie Calafell for her encouragement and thoughtful editing. The author is also grateful to the reviewers who provided her with thoughtful feedback. Many thanks to the editors, Matt Foy and Benny Huang-LeMaster, for their support and work with this piece. Kaleidoscope: Vol. 12, 2013: Hobson 35 hot and bothered and I can forget how to be critical. There is so much flesh I want to know intimately. I desire the raw kind of drag that showcases the liminal space between tender and tough, pain and pleasure, masculine and feminine. In my experience, drag kings tend toward this type of drag more than drag queens, but generalizations are almost always problematic. I am also a sucker for clever choreography, good song choices, and costumes that express the drag personae a performer is performing. Mostly, I want drag performances to offer new insights for the potential of queering gender, sexual, racial, and class expressions. I want drag to challenge and subvert our notions about normativity and all of the racist, capitalist, classist, sexist, misogynist systems that place demands and regulations on certain bodies to dress in certain ways, relate with certain people, marry those people, and reproduce new people. I want drag to pull back the veil of mystification regarding intersectional identities so that everyone is expressing their gender authentically, being aroused sufficiently, and liberating themselves appropriately. Instead, I find drag king performances as sites filled with tension, glorifying a white, masculine-expressing butch or tomboi3 aesthetic, at the expense of drag kings of color, lower-class kings, femme-drag performers, and burlesque queens who often occupy the same stage. Some performers may argue that drag is “just for fun” or “just a performance,” but it is inevitable that audience members and other performers will receive ideological messages from these performances and the performers who embody them. Performance is truly theory and method (Conquergood; Madison), and as such we learn our identities, including gender, sexuality, race, and class, through seeing, doing, watching, and participating in performances that showcase various ways of embodying these differing identities. Utilizing a methodology of critical performance autoethnography, I examine a drag king performance at a gay bar in a midsize Midwestern city. Although I have performed in femme-drag before, I was solely an audience member this night, watching and learning. Although this project is about drag kings and the experience of those embodying “female masculinity” or “masculinity without men” (Halberstam, Female Masculinity), it is just as much about femininity (and the rejection of it) and misogyny (because of the rejection of femininity), and it is also about racism and classism and white and middle class privilege. It is about access and bodies and different access to different bodies. This essay explores the performative tensions inevitable in gendered drag performances and asks the audience to consider how drag teeters a jagged line between our normative ideological assumptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class and the performances that resist those norms. 3 The use of the term “boi” is used in queer-female circles to denote a younger tomboy aesthetic, affectations, and behaviors. In some cases boi may refer to a lesbian, dyke, queer, transgender, genderqueer, or intersex individual. 36 Using an intersectional queer lens, I argue that queer drag king performances do the work of oppression and social justice simultaneously. To demonstrate this, I first examine existing literature of drag, female masculinities, and femme-drag performance; second, I e (...truncated)