Queen, Please!

Existing literature on drag and masculinity addresses three different, but often-overlapping, categories: drag queens, drag kings, and trans-subjectivities. Since critical analyses of drag and masculinities are relatively recent phenomena, this project compiles an interdisciplinary approach—investigating theory, narratives, popular films, documentaries, TV shows, blogs, zines, online social networking sites, local newspapers, and online videos. Multimedia representations and recordings of drag shows particularly fill a very important niche often missing in traditional research of drag communities. The existing research of has primarily explored three trajectories: the study of drag queens’ complex genders and identities with masculinity; drag kings’ queering of masculinities through performance and parody; and how trans-subjectivities queer the queen/king dichotomy and subvert the primacy of the body through drag.

Much existing research on drag queens is devoted to the debate on whether or not drag queens are gender conformist Babbitts or gender radicals. Scholars Marilyn Frye, Steven Schacht, and Richard Tewksbury argue that drag queens’ performances and use of camp only appropriate stereotypical attributes of femininity and reinforce heterosexist gender norms[i]. While theorists Judith Butler, Esther Newton, Taylor and Rupp, maintain that drag queens’ campy performances theatrically transgress heterosexist gender/sexuality scripts by making the binary strictures of sex, gender, and sexuality visible[ii]. This paper will part company from this debate—allowing for the paradoxes of drag queens’ performances, identities, and sexualities. Many theorists and popular media representations of drag queens illustrate the emphasis on “un-covering:” revealing the queen’s “true” (male) body and (homo)sexuality underneath the drag[iii]. This underlying, “true” identity is so significant that in the national drag queen pageant, Miss Gay USofA, contestants are judged on their male realness during their interviews—in which formal suit and tie are the required attire[iv]. There is also emerging body of theory and media exploring the cyclical relationship of admiration/appropriation between drag queens and heterosexual/femme-identified women[v]. There is a troubling lack of analysis on drag queens’ relationships with masculinity. Drag queens themselves place great emphasis on uncovering—revealing their true “male” selves—but there is relatively little study of how drag queens view their own masculinity on and off the stage. Why? Have theorists determined that drag queens are only worthy of gender analysis insofar as when they perform femininity? Such an analysis once again announces that only women have gender and shrouds masculinity as the unmarked norm.




[i] Marilyn Frye, Politics of Reality (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983); Steven P. Schacht, “The Multiple Genders of the Court: Issues of Identity and Performance in a Drag Setting’, in Feminism and Men: Reconstructing Gender Relations, eds. S. Schacht and D. Ewing (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Steven P. Schacht, “Lesbian Drag Kings and the Feminine Embodiment of the Masculine,” in The Drag King Anthology, eds. Donna Troka, Kathleen Lebesco, and Jean Noble (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002); Richard Tewksbury, “Gender Construction and the Female Impersonator: The Process of Transforming ‘He’ to ‘She,’” Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (1994): 27–43.


[ii] Butler, “Imitation”; Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge), 2004; Newton, Mother Camp; Taylor and Rupp, “Chicks With Dicks”; Verta Taylor, Leila J. Rupp, and Eve Shapiro, “Drag Queens and Drag Kings: The Difference Gender Makes,” Sexualities 13 (2010): 275-94.


[iii] Pageant, DVD, directed by Ron Davis and Stewart Halpern-Fingerhut, (Memphis: Cineaste Productions, 2008); Ru Paul’s Drag Race, television show (2008, World of Wonder, LOGO 2009); Taylor and Rupp, “Chicks with Dicks”; Taylor, Rupp, and Shapiro, “Drag Queens and Drag Kings”; To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, DVD, directed by Beeban Kidron, written by Douglas Carter Beane (Universal Pictures, 1995); Tootsie, DVD, directed by Sydney Pollack (Colombia Pictures Corporation, 1982). Victor/Victoria, DVD, directed by Blake Edwards (MGM, 1982). Wigstock: The Movie, DVD, directed by Barry Shils (New York: Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1995).


[iv] Pageant, 2008.


[v] Amber Hollibaugh, “My Dangerous Desires: Falling in Love with Stone Butches; Passing Women and Girls (Who Are Guys) Who Catch My Eye,” Queer Cultures, eds. Deborah Carlin and Jennifer DiGrazia (Pearson/Prentice Hall Publishers, 2004) 371-385; Roberta Mock, “Heteroqueer Ladies: Some Performative Transactions between Gay Men and Heterosexual Women,” Feminist Review, no. 75, Identities (2003): 20-37. Paris is Burning, directed by Jenni Livingston (Miramax Films, 1991). Ru Paul’s Drag Race, television show (2008, World of Wonder, LOGO 2009); To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, DVD, directed by Beeban Kidron, written by Douglas Carter Beane (Universal Pictures, 1995).