Born Naked – A Theoretical Exploration of Drag, Gender and Identity
Artwork: Queen Katya by Stephanie Fraser / Photo: Otto Lehtonen
After losing its allure and having been lost at sea for a decade, drag has finally risen from its ashes, and it's thriving like never before. After the phenomenal success of RuPaul's Drag Race and host RuPaul Charles's Emmy Award win, it's safe to say the queer art of drag is more mainstream than ever. RuPaul's Drag Race, a reality tv-show that has changed numerous careers and lives, drag itself, and queer culture worldwide, has to get some credit for the recent, ever growing interest in drag.
However, it would be highly ignorant to take Drag Race as representative of all drag culture, as the show only features homosexual men performing as drag queens (Marcel 2014, 15). Even though there's just as many types of drag as there are drag performers, in the universe of Drag Race there are rigid rules that drag queens are expected to follow when it comes to makeup, hair, and costumes. The queens are expected to be unique, yet at the same time fit a certain mold. For example, the show's season six runner-up and All Stars season two dropout Adore Delano has gotten tremendous critique because of her tomboyish punk rock style(1), as it challenges normative drag femininity.
One recurring issue in and outside Drag Race is the validity and identity of 'fishy queens' – the hyperfeminine drag queens who could pass as real women (Norris 2014, 33). Fishy queens are often looked down upon in the drag community (and especially in Drag Race), which seems paradoxical as female drag is essentially about performing and playing with femininity and feminine gender roles. Why are fishy queens low on the pecking order of drag queens? Is the problem in the performance or underneath all the wigs, makeup and costumes?
I will focus solely on drag queens, as I have very little to no knowledge on drag kings or bio(logical) queens. Even though my focus is on drag queens, the same problems and theories can be applied to drag kings when seen as sort of a mirror image of drag queens (”not a man wearing a wig, but a woman wearing a moustache”). Inspired by the subversiveness of drag and fishy queens, I will move on to a theoretical exploration of gender and identity in the last section of the article.
BORN NAKED
Our human existence is a constant battle between masculinity and femininity, and nearly everything can be reduced to either one of these basic ”elements”. For example, the current presidential election going on in the United States can be reduced to a battle between a man and a woman, regardless of intentions or qualifications to become president. The idea of 'men and/or women' is so ingrained in our thought that it's nearly impossible to imagine any genders beyond them. However, living as neither man nor woman, as something in-between, or as something way beyond such classifications, is just as much of a social reality as living as a man or a woman. For lack of a better word, such lives and identities are often collectively called 'queer' or 'transgender'.
In her groundbreaking 1990 book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler puts drag on a pedestal as the subversive act: ”In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency” (Butler 1999, 175). Simply put, according to Butler, drag shows us that gender is an ever changing performance, not a set in stone fact. A similar gospel is often preached by RuPaul – ”We're all born naked and the rest is drag”(2). Drag may seem like the ultimate liberative act, the one to free us all from the oppressive shackels of heteronormativity. Yet, even though femininity is the material a drag queen works with, there would be no 'female drag' without fundamental masculinity.
The Realness
Drag and cross-dressing are often put under the umbrella term 'transgender', which, for example, also includes transsexuals and genderqueers. Even though drag is essentially smoke and mirrors, a performance, it is at the same time a pseudo-identity. This is especially relevant for the problem of identity regarding fishy queens. During season two, contestant Tatianna was both taunted and lauded by others for her fishy drag, and she was later labelled 'the original fish'. She got her ”ru-demption” in the first episode of the second season of All Stars in 2016, performing a spoken word piece entitled The Same Parts, earning her the top two spot of the week. Her performance addresses a fishy queen's ability to pass as a (biological) woman as a double-edged sword with lines like ”'Cause boys really need to know, before calling me boo,” and ”Because baby boy, I got all the same parts that you do.” The Same Parts shows the pseudo-identity side of drag – for some (fishy) queens their hyperfeminine performance might be an important part of, for example, their sexuality. Being able to sexually appeal to men who are attracted to femininity and ”women” can be crucial to their sexual expression, yet there's always the possibility of transphobia, which can have serious consequences like transphobic violence.
Margaret Morgan's remark in her article on beauty in contemporary art, ”The early nineteenth-century expectation that works of art should 'enchant us, not because they are so natural but because they have been made so natural' […]” (Morgan 2006, 165), seems to also go for drag. As Norris notes in her article, in RuPaul's Drag Race fishy queens often get ”verbally mocked by other queens” (Norris 2014, 33). The problem is this naturalness of fishy queens. As drag is supposedly a performance (made natural), we get anxious if we're no longer sure whether it really is a performance or not. We need to know that underneath the costumes there's really a man, just playing a female role. Fishy queens are most often not comedy queens (as portrayed in Drag Race), which also adds to this fear of an underlying female identity. We're safe from such suspicions when femininity and female gender roles are made fun of and not taken too seriously (because why would a man ever be serious about being a woman?). Thus the underlying problem with fishy queens is not the lack of femininity, but the paradoxical lack of an insufficently masculine identity.
Can a drag queen identify as a man, yet feel like ”himself” and just as comfortable in drag as out of drag? Maybe the problem isn't their (gender) identity, it's how identity itself is defined and understood. Does feeling like a man mean that you cannot at the next moment feel like a woman? The problem with identity is that it's either this or that, it cannot be both. There have been several groundbreaking rethinkings of (gender) identity in poststructuralist theory, such as Butler's gender performativity theory and the idea of identity as performance. The problem, however, lies in the lack of sufficent theory on 'transgender'. Studies on transgender identities have mostly focused on the identities of transsexuals (on feelings of being in ”the wrong body” or feeling like your gender doesn't match your biological sex) and have thus failed to address other transgender identities that play outside the binary playground of male–female.
Geronimo
”Those who wanted to live in a world in which there was no plausible deniability that a beautiful woman could ever be a man are directly challenged [by drag]” (Marcel 2014, 20), or as Tatianna puts it, ”What you see, isn't always the truth.” However, I beg to differ, as I think it's actually quite the contrary – what you see often is the truth. When a biological male looks like a beautiful woman, isn't 'a beautiful woman' exactly what they are? To truly understand this phenomenological approach to gender the reader has to understand this: body parts no longer matter. As a simplified example: a man with a vagina isn't ”really” a woman, nor is a woman with a penis ”really” a man. Body parts like penises and vaginas lose their direct correlation to femininity, masculinity and gender in general. During an era of ever growing interest in new materialism, it's a risky business to ignore materiality. Yet I suggest we try, even if we fail to convince anyone.
Terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' can give fresh and revolutionary insights to those whose lives revolve around the (biological determinist) social reality of ”there are women and there are men, and then there's the grey area”. Such terms also limit our prospects of finding new ways to understand gender – everything that isn't simply male or female can be called 'queer', and any person who isn't male or female can simply be called 'transgender'. So, is there any point in trying to find new ways to understand gender, an unquestionable basis to our whole existence? ”Why bother, there's already a one-size-fits-all solution to your existential gender trouble!”
We do not have enough words for the plethora of gender identities. Is it even necessary to neatly categorise and name every kind of identity? Yes and no. We do need more words and terms so that we can collectively begin to understand what lies beyond man/woman. At the same time we also need to understand that identities change, transgress and move in unforeseen ways. If there's an identity, there's also the negation of it. There's also an identity that touched upon the other one yet at the same time resists it. We have the desperate need to know what something is, and what it is not (for example, a drag queen is a man in a dress, not really a woman). Can we ever understand something if we do not know what it is?
I suggest we try a phenomenological approach to gender – what you see is the truth. The first step is to understand that there are things we do not know and do not understand, and learn to accept it. After this we can begin to accept things as they present themselves to us. A drag queen is a 'man', a 'woman', a 'drag queen', a 'performer', and most of all: human. What we seem to have lost is the understanding of humanity. We aren't just men or women, we're so much more – we're human. Not everyone is a man or a woman, but everyone is a human being. At this moment there are over 7,462,887,700 people in the world. Such a huge number can only mean variation beyond this or that. So, the next time you meet someone, could you, instead of ”Is that person male or female?”, perceive them as human?
Notes
(1) Harsh critique of her style choices by the show's judges during the first episode resulted in Delano quitting the second season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars.
(2) For example in the chorus of her song Born Naked (feat. Clairy Browne) from the 2014 album Born Naked.
Bibliography
- Butler, Judith 1999. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
- Daems, Jim (Ed.) 2014. The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race. Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.
- Jones, Amelia (Ed.) 2006. A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945. Malden: Blackwell.
- Kohlsdorf, Kai 2014. ”Policing the Proper Queer Subject: RuPaul's Drag Race in the Neoliberal ”Post” Moment.” In Daems, Jim (Ed.). The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race. Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 67-87.
- Marcel, Mary 2014. ”Representing Gender, Race and Realness: The Television World of America's Next Drag Superstars” In Daems, Jim (Ed.). The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race. Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 13-30.
- Morgan, Margaret 2006. ”Regarding Beauty.” In Jones, Amelia (Ed.). A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945. Malden: Blackwell, 164-187.
- Norris, Laurie 2014. ”Of Fish and Feminists: Homonormative Misogyny and the Trans*Queen.” In Daems, Jim (Ed.). The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race. Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 31-48.