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[c_smudge]

I need help parsing something out: so gender theorists, please add your two cents.

When is "drag" (specifically, male people performing female drag) a parody of gender (ie, a Good thing) and when is it a parody of women (a Bad thing)?

Comments

[c_smudge]

familiar with the work of e patrick johnson but he doesn't talk much about drag or blackface that i've been able to locate.

one thing that keeps popping up for me is impact vs intent. you say for you drag is about "performance" not about "women", but you are taking the trappings of femininity and using them as tools, so it is on some level always going to have a female aspect. this is in theory a major problem with drag: men temporarily take on representations outside of masculinity (mostly those of femininity) for entertainment and sometimes benefit in some way, then at the end of the day they take it off and go back to being male. women are oppressed by these same trappings of femininty and cannot take them off at the end of the day.

it's interesting that you say ryan says he feels more masculine in drag--that makes sense if masculinity is predicated on control and dominance. what could be more dominant than a man outdoing women at their own gender performance?

not familiar with avenue q so i can't comment, but from the little i know of dame edna, her shtick is to be as offensive as possible. he (humphries) creates her character as an actress who hates her audience, is flighty, superficial, ignorant etc, i must ask, why not play a male character? somehow he feels being female adds to that two-faced-ness, that superficiality, that flightiness, adds to the believability that the character is ignorant.

yes, dame edna is and can be entertaining, but it has more implications.