A Modest Defense of Drag
On Performance, Authenticity, and "Naturalness"
It almost goes without saying that drag performance (a style of performance art characterized by exaggerated expressions of gender) has—like any style of performance art—much potential for good and for bad. It can be used to send many different messages, sometimes at the same time: mockery, parody, satire, frivolity, yes—but also respect, empowerment, defiance, even mourning (have you ever heard of the Fire Island Italian Widows?). Drag can be narrowly focused on aesthetics, but this is itself a kind of message about the significance of aesthetics. Better questions than “what does drag mean?” are always “what can drag mean?” or “what might this particular drag performance mean?” So what are the possibilities for meaning in drag performance, what insights can it offer, and how might they help us?
Gender As Performance
While drag can be influenced or motivated by a wide diversity of worldviews, a core tenet of any philosophy of drag is gender as performance.
Most of us are aware of the distinction between sex (a biological reality that is generally described by such words as “male,” “female,” “intersex,” etc.) and gender (a social and psychological reality, a sense of oneself as “man,” “woman,” “non-binary,” etc.). This theoretical distinction feels natural enough to the modern person, even though it has not always been widely accepted. It makes sense for most of us that, for instance, understanding oneself to be a man and being biologically male are not precisely the same thing. If this were not true, encouragements such as “be a man!” would make no real sense to us (manhood, in this exhortation, is not merely a given fact but also an end or goal). Concepts like “man” or “woman” can be defined either as primarily linked to sex, or as primarily linked to gender. Sex and gender are clearly distinct, even if one makes the further claim that they must not be totally separated.
Gender is not only inwardly sensed by the individual (gender identity), but also outwardly expressed to others (gender expression); whether one knows oneself to be a woman is of course not the same thing as dressing “like a woman” or being perceived as a woman. In speaking of drag as gender performance, we are entering into this much trickier territory of gender expression. Gender in this sense is communicated—and thus, it can be communicated sincerely or insincerely, well or poorly. It can be perceived correctly or incorrectly, properly understood or misunderstood. It can be communicated in many different styles. There is a lot of flexibility here!
Drag performance can highlight the malleable nature of gender expression for us, and invite us to consider how what we often think of as natural and essential to us are actually performances into which we put real effort, whether consciously or unconsciously. While we may be born male or female, we learn from our community how to act “like a man” or “like a woman,” how to be perceived as a man or woman. Manhood and womanhood, in this sense, is not something you are or have, but something you do, something you perform. This does not necessarily mean that these aspects of our identity are unimportant, insincere, or unreal, just that they are also performances. Performances (like, for instance, liturgies) can be authentic!
Revealing False Selves
But drag performance can also critique the unintentional performance, the mindless masquerading, of which so many of us are guilty. All of us are deeply and helplessly invested in creating and maintaining facades, even (or maybe even especially) those of us who pride ourselves in being “authentic.” Unfortunately, the performances of which we are least aware are sometimes the ones which are the most inauthentic, the most painfully destructive. Drag can be helpful in revealing this.
Drag performers (like actors) sometimes speak of becoming their drag persona by putting on clothes and doing their makeup. The costume creates the persona, or as the saying goes, “the clothes make the man.” I am reminded of the way the apostle Paul encourages the Ephesians to “clothe yourself with the new self” (Ephesians 4:24 NRSVUE), which is at the very least a kind of disciplined practice of inhabiting a new identity through performance—a habitus that forms us. Our truest identity must, it turns out, be put on like a set of clothes, an outfit which might fit unnaturally at first. But through continually inhabiting it, it can mold and shape us.
Some dress-up is mere facade, but some is much more than that. Drag can be an image of this kind of identity formation through disciplined action.
Questioning the Normal
It has happened to me once or twice: a drag king steps onto the stage and performs a wildly over-the-top caricature of masculinity, and I am surprised to find myself attracted to him. In these moments I know he is not necessarily a man; he is living a persona, he has learned to dress and move in ways that mimic masculinity as it appears “in the wild.” But it brings up some interesting questions: if as a gay man I find myself attracted to this imitation of masculinity, what does that say about me? What even is masculinity, if basically anyone can perform it?
It works the other way too, when drag is, shall we say, unconvincing. When, say, a man performs in drag as a woman badly, an audience might be struck by how unnatural it seems for her to be wearing lipstick and a dress, moving “the way a woman is supposed to move.” But how natural is it for anyone to wear lipstick and a dress? What does it mean to move “the way a woman is supposed to move”?
These questions reveal that what masquerades as “normal” or “natural” can so often be pretty arbitrary—or more insidiously, an attempt at domination by enforcing a particular standard of behavior. So much of what is accepted as normal in our culture in the United States, for instance, would be puzzling to much of the rest of the world: our gender roles that are either too rigid or too fluid, our idea of intimacy in friendship, our extreme individualism. Drag performance can help us become more vigilant, enabling us to see when assumed normalcy or naturalness can be a prescriptive force used by some with less-than-noble motives, rather than just descriptive.
This insight can be particularly resonant for those disciples whom Christ speaks of as living “in the world” but not “belong[ing] to the world” (John 17:11, 14 NRSVUE), not mindlessly inhabiting the patterns of the surrounding culture which does not follow him. I am reminded of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus questioned cultural patterns like objectifying women, no-fault divorce, retributive justice, and the accumulation of wealth, patterns which were understood by many as “normal” and “natural,” but which contributed to the oppression of women and the poor. A first step in living a faithful counter-cultural witness can be recognizing the dominant scripts for what is “normal” or “natural," and drag performance can help us do so.
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Drag performance is not monolithic, and I have only scratched the surface in exploring the possibilities for meaning in drag and how these meanings might help us. Note that I have not sought to defend every particular drag performance (which would be just as ridiculous as seeking to defend every particular acting performance), but only tried to gesture at the goodness, truth, and beauty that many find difficult to see in drag. I believe that drag performance has genuine insights to offer us that are resonant with the Christian tradition: it can reveal that gender is always in some sense performed (and that performance can be authentic), that we are often guilty of mindlessly performing identity, and that our sense of what is “normal” or “natural” might actually be pretty arbitrary, or even oppressive.
A crucial role of good art is that it prompts us to think, to consider afresh—to get us out of our habitual ways of perceiving, look at things from a different angle, and be transformed in the process. Drag performance can help us to do just these things.