On Thursday, I went out for dinner at Lips, a drag club on Bank Street. In search of a fun night out, I found the place on the internet. Their website describes the club/restaurant as ‘the ultimate in drag dining’, ‘with a special party every night’.  As I was attending on a Thursday night I was able to catch their nine o’clock dinner show, ‘Dining with the Diva’s’, described as a ‘non-stop celebrity extravaganza’ featuring performances by Diana Ross, Barbara Streisand, Madonna, Dolly Parton, Cher and many more. Coming from a conservative, mainly Protestant town on Northern Ireland’s infamous North Antrim Bible belt, I was prepared to be shocked by the events of the evening and I wasn’t disappointed. In retrospect, I can now recognise that my shock lay in my misconception that drag queen is just another word for a female impersonator; according to Julian Fleisher this is a common mistake.

While I had a vague impression that drag queens were perhaps a bit more flamboyant than impersonators, I was unaware that the difference lay in the fact that drag queens, unlike impersonators, do not try to uncannily recreate the personae of a woman. Rather they are in the business of theatricality, enlarging and heightening representations of gender for the purpose of ‘getting a better look’.  As Fleisher relates in his book, The Drag Queens of New York, ‘By stretching hyper-idealized versions of the female anatomy almost to the breaking point, drag insists that we question the worth of those very ideals. It’s not about mocking the female body or its accoutrements, but about ballooning those aspects to the point where their absurdity is laid bare. In other words, even if the queen is not standing on a stage, drag is theatre of the ridiculous taken to its most existentially ridiculous’.   Having seen the dinner show I can now understand the argument that Fleisher makes. Not for one second during the show was I under the illusion that I was watching a biologically female performer. This is due to the fact that the drag queens constantly break the flow of their performance through making jokes about their true biological sex. These ‘interruptions’ are certainly effective in creating humour and a sense of irony for the audience. Central to my argument, however, is the idea that although perhaps not consciously concerned with gender at all, a drag performance draws attention to the performativity of and thus questions putative societal notions of gender and identity as discussed by Judith Butler and in a sense partakes of what Stephen Whittle describes as ‘gender fuck’, a phrase deeply implicated in queer theory, which means ‘a removal of pathologies of sexuality and gendered behaviour…a full frontal theoretical and practical attack on the dimorphism of gender and sex roles’, emphasised by the interruptions in the gender performance.

On entering Lips, one is immediately aware that this is a place obsessed with the concept of glamour. The place is dripping with chandeliers, beads and fur. There is fur draped across the reception desk when you enter. We were greeted by ‘Diana Ross’, six feet tall, with huge hair, a beaded gown, bright red lips and nails and weighing about three hundred pounds. She strutted ahead of us to show us to out table and when seated, took a good long look at my boyfriend saying ‘He’s a cutie, do you mind if I give him a little kiss honey?’. Without really waiting for my approval, she lunged in and gave him a long kiss on the lips, leaving him covered in bright red lipstick and then, not waiting for any recognition of this event, declared ‘right then, I’ll get y’all some menus’. Cindy Adams, a critic for the New York Post, also recently visited Lips, and in her article she describes her waitress, ‘Beef Patty’. ‘All Beef Patty, inside a wig that would make Dolly Parton look bald, glued on eyelashes so thick they’d work in a car wash, major make-up and a short black patent leather skirt, sniped about a fellow (pardon the expression) drag queen who went by: ‘Her outfit’s by Dolce and Garbage’’.   According to Fleisher, Drag Queens are fairly obsessed with the notion of glamour, ‘rare is the drag queen who is not in some fundamental fashion exhibiting a sense of glamour.’ He then goes on to argue that this obsession stem from the idea that ‘glamour is nothing more than the outward, primarily sartorial expression of wealth and once again we’re back to square one: what a commercial, consumer society wants of its ideal woman. Take the perfect set of breasts, a great pair of legs, terrific bones and a lot of cash, mix well and presto! Glamour arrives: What the drag queen knows implicitly is that few women (and fewer men) can reasonably live up to that ideal. Drag itself gains a great deal of power from the distance it creates between the disdain it has for commercialised standards of beauty and its uncanny ability to bring those ideas to life-sort of’.   Thus Fleisher argues that the irony of a drag performance is effective in demonstrating and critiquing attitudes and ideas about what gender means, what men and women are supposed to be like, as determined by heteronormative society. Through a show of parody and theatrics, innuendo and sexual mimicry, drag queens not only present a caricature of femininity as ascribed by such a culture but also consequently draw attention to the concept of masculinity as it is understood in terms of commercial culture, exposing it as unnatural. Fleisher asserts, ‘By donning a pair of false breasts, eyelashes and the sine qua non of drag, a wig, drag automatically asks the question: what is it we expect of our women and our men?’.

The idea of gender being ‘unnatural’ is in fact centre to Judith Butler’s discussion of performativity, which proposes that gender is not a ‘natural’ element of ourselves or inextricably linked to our biological sex but rather, as Richard Schechner writes, ‘a humanly constructed concept designed to accomplish human ends…gender as performed in contemporary Western societies enacts a normative heterosexuality that is a major tool for enforcing a patriarchal, phallocentric social order.’ . This emerges from Michel Foucault’s assertion that the ‘self’ is not pre-existing but rather is constructed through our relations with the world and structures of knowledge and power.  In other words we embody and are constituted by the discourses that make up the world around us. In her book entitled Gender Trouble, Butler elaborates upon Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that ‘one is not born a woman but rather becomes one’ , confronting humanist notions of pre-existing self-hood, arguing that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results..Then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actor’s themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.’  Butler thus asserts the idea that there is no real of abiding self, rather our concept of selfhood is established through sets of repeated acts, learned from those around us. ‘One is not a body, but in some very key sense, one does one’s body’.

Butler’s proposal is key to the discussion of drag in that the concept of drag in itself is problematic if one assumes that there is a ‘true’ or ‘real’ gender. In fact Butler positions non heterosexual sexuality in opposition to the hegemonic social order in that it disrupts the stability of a binary categorization of sexuality. Marjorie Garber is quoted in Stephen Whittle’s essay entitled Gender Fucking or Fucking Gender, as saying that transvestism is ‘a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but a crisis of category itself’. Garber’s point it seems, is that by adopting the recognised physical and cultural marks of another gender and magnifying them, by impersonating the opposite sex and taking it to the extreme, drag queens essentially impersonate an impersonation and mock the concept of that impersonation. If we learn our gender through the restored behaviour of others, then what is the difference in them learning it from ‘real’ women? And could they in fact be considered real women in the sense that they exhibit the same marks of gender as biological females? This then raises the question of whether women truly exist at all. This issue is addressed by Julia Kristeva who asserts that ‘strictly speaking, women cannot be said to exist’ and is elaborated upon in Butler’s book entitled Gender Trouble. Butler suggests; ‘Assuming for a moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies…even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution, there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two’. She continues to say that ‘the presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relationship of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it’.   The idea of drag as being an impersonation of an impersonation is taken up by Butler again, in her essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination. She addresses the idea of drag copying a behaviour of which there is no true original, a copy of a copy. The caricatures presented by the drag queens of New York then, are effective in exposing and mocking (consciously or unconsciously), ‘the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalised, worn and done’.  It reveals gender to be a performative act, a doing but not a doing by a conscious doer. In other words there is no pre-existing self that chooses a gender to perform, it is not a role to be taken on and off at will.

As illustrated by their constant allusions to their biological sex, most drag queens aren’t even trying to be like a woman. In fact the concept of drag has little to do with a queen’s desire to change their sex, rather it is mostly to do with trying to be as little like a man as possible. Fleisher suggests that ‘drag is essentially an act of liberation, a push to shake the yoke of masculine expectations attached to being male’.  He describes how men who might feel shackled by society’s notions of what a man is and should be strive to be as different to that ideal as is possible. In answer to those who might suggest that in adopting a female persona, the drag queen essentially just reinforces binary notions of gender categorization, Fleisher answers that ‘in shedding those masculine qualities, the queen chooses not to dress as, say, an ostrich or for that matter a doorknob, is surely due to the fact that the natural antidote to the masculine, especially in a culture so averse to anything in between, is the feminine.’  Fleisher argues that those who think that drag confirms categorization are failing to understand that the effectiveness of drag emerges from the idea of gender layering. One gender is laid on top of the other to the effect of presenting an irony and parody that destabilizes the idea of gender binarism.

This gender layering is exposed through the continuous interruptions in the gender performance. During ‘Dinner with the Divas’, the illusion, though not much of an illusion admittedly, was broken by various incidents. At one point Diana Ross’s gel bra insert fell out ‘accidentally’, though I suspect it may have been on purpose. Instead of pretending it didn’t happen she made a huge fuss and called to a gentleman, ‘Sir I’ve dropped my boob. Come over here and help a girl out’. The man was then forced to bend down and pick up her insert and help her to reposition it appropriately. At another point, while doing a lap dance for one of the men in the audience, Britney Spears, who had previously been rubbing the man’s hands all over her chest, dropped his hands a little lower and into her pants at which point she shouted, ‘Yes that’s right I have a dick! Got a problem with that buddy? Not woman enough for you?’. She later joked, ‘I was only kidding earlier, I’m all woman. Trust me.’ In being made party to the supposed gender deception, the illusion is consciously broken by the performer. The ‘substitution’ of body parts associated with one gender and the ‘concealment’ of those which are seen to conflict with the intended display as described by Richard Ekins and Dave King , are not only revealed to us, they are practically forced down our throats, which in fact almost happened literally to one unfortunate audience member. While one might think that the aim of this is just for laughs, whether intentionally or otherwise, it says something of the politics of gender binarism and the effects of poststructuralist discourse on its stability and staying power.

It is probably those who claim that drag reinforces conventional ideas of gender that argue that reminders and interruptions of the gender performance only serve to, as Michele Aaron articulates in her essay Pass/Fail,  ‘reinforce the essentialism of gender even if the [performer’s] easy disguise confirmed its performativity.’ . She suggests that these interruptions in gender play ‘exploit transgression only to heighten the return to order, or, as Annette Kuhn writes, it ‘problematises gender identity and sexual difference…only to confirm the absoluteness of both…These disruptions to passing, represent the spectator’s disavowal of queerness: they both deny and acknowledge, contain and permit, the queer by-products of cross-dressing’. I would argue however that instead of confirming gender binarism, drag takes gender play to such an extreme that it eradicates any notions of ‘real’ or ‘true’ pre-given gender. Drag queens don’t just play with the idea of gender, they, as Stephen Whittle suggests, fuck with it, they embrace the idea of ‘queer’.  The concept of ‘queerness’ is extremely difficult to define or pin down although it could be argued that that in itself is the aim of queer theory, to resist and avoid definition. Not unlike Butler, queer theorists draw heavily upon the ideas of post-structuralism, rejecting the notion of a monolithic singular sexual identity. Alternatively they propose the creation of a new theoretical space in which there are no distinct gender boundaries. This is suggested by Tamsin Wilton in her book entitles Sexual (Dis)Orientation when she describes the possibility to ‘perturb the entire field of heteroerotic normativity by establishing a theoretical location, eccentric to the heteronorm, that is amenable to occupation by anyone who wishes to position themselves as queer’.

My argument then is that that these interruptions in the gender fantasy do not in anyway reinforce gender binarisms due to the fact that they happen so often in drag. Because drag performers are constantly and consciously crossing gender boundaries and borders as erected by heteronormative society, the boundaries are effectively broken down. Instead the performers embody the theoretical space that Wilton proposes, a place of gender ambiguity and fluidity. As Whittle asserts, this idea of ‘gender-fuck’ has the consequence of destabilising and deconstructing the notion of gender as symptomatic of a unified subject position, ‘a play with gender partitioning to ultimately make the partitions meaningless’ . In truth drag queens are not really conscious of what their performance is saying about gender and in a sense that is what is most queer. This is effectively illustrated by a comment made in Mark Duberman’s Stonewall, by Holly Woodlawn, the one surviving member of Andy Warhol’s famous troika of drag superstars. In reference to the drag queen as entity she said, ‘It’s not a man or a woman, it’s just fabulous!’.