Babe as a denaturalized identifier
Still working on Halberstam's Female Masculinity, and I had to share this fantastic excerpt from her chapter on drag kings:
While the drag king contest makes a perfect arena for the denaturalization of masculinity, assaults on natural gender and on the redundancy of the nature-nurture binary are appearing regularly in popular culture. For example, a great example of denaturalized identification was featured as a comic device in the 1995 movie Babe. This film tells the story of the little pig who wants to be a sheepdog partly because he realizes that pigs get eaten on the farm and dogs don't, and partly because all his primary connections and identifications are with dogs. Babe depicts the triumph of function over form when the pig, Babe, proves to be a better sheepdog than a sheepdog. The success of Babe's dog performance depends on assumption of the role "dog" with a difference. Babe does not merely mimic the chief sheepdog or try to look like a dog; he appropriates dogness, learns dog functions, and performs them. Whereas the master sheepdog presumes his superiority over the sheep, Babe refuses to construct a new hierarchy or to preserve natural hierarchies; instead, he proves his willingness and ability to herd and shows proper respect for the sheep and above all takes pleasure in his dogness. This film remarks on the comic disarticulation of dogness from dogs and suggests that the logic of the unnatural allows for pigs to be dogs, and in a moving subpot, it even allows ducks to be cocks or roosters.
While the drag king contest makes a perfect arena for the denaturalization of masculinity, assaults on natural gender and on the redundancy of the nature-nurture binary are appearing regularly in popular culture. For example, a great example of denaturalized identification was featured as a comic device in the 1995 movie Babe. This film tells the story of the little pig who wants to be a sheepdog partly because he realizes that pigs get eaten on the farm and dogs don't, and partly because all his primary connections and identifications are with dogs. Babe depicts the triumph of function over form when the pig, Babe, proves to be a better sheepdog than a sheepdog. The success of Babe's dog performance depends on assumption of the role "dog" with a difference. Babe does not merely mimic the chief sheepdog or try to look like a dog; he appropriates dogness, learns dog functions, and performs them. Whereas the master sheepdog presumes his superiority over the sheep, Babe refuses to construct a new hierarchy or to preserve natural hierarchies; instead, he proves his willingness and ability to herd and shows proper respect for the sheep and above all takes pleasure in his dogness. This film remarks on the comic disarticulation of dogness from dogs and suggests that the logic of the unnatural allows for pigs to be dogs, and in a moving subpot, it even allows ducks to be cocks or roosters.