Dragged
I just listened to most of this Radio 4 item on drag queen story hour, in which Jo Bartosch argued against and some young guy who says “like” way too often argued for. The host was, predictably, somewhat flippant about the whole thing, but what really annoys me is that no one at any point stopped to ask why is this only one-way? Why is it monodirectional? Why is there no drag king story hour? Why is it all about men making a joke of women while no one is making a joke of men?
I would really like to know.
They talk about panto, and someone (I think the like-saying guy) mentions Shakespeare, meaning actually theater in general at that time and before: women did not perform on stage, end of story. So ok drag queens have roots in theater history, perhaps. Fine, but this is now. Women are allowed to perform on stage and in films and on television. They can’t get parts written for them, they can’t get producers to hire them, but they are formally permitted to do the work.
This is now. The whole idea of drag queens reading stories to children in high squeaky voices is very now. So why is it all men??? Why do men get to go to libraries and make fun of women and get paid for it, while women don’t get to go to libraries and make fun of men?
I’d like to know.
It’s very odd that no one brought that up, not even Jo (though she did make the necessary point about the fact that drag basically mocks women and that shouldn’t just be ignored). It needs to be brought up more. Drag queens are a thing; drag kings are not (at least not in libraries); why not? What does that tell us?
Also, Shakespeare’s actors were not “drag queens”; they were boys/men performing a part who then went home again as boys/men until the next performance.
When I played Per Gynt I did not identify as a Norwegian boy who made very bad choices on the way to manhood, I simply acted as being that boy.
We don’t know a whole lot about them; maybe some of them did carry on acting after hours, maybe some of them were gay – but it was an apprenticeship, so their future would be playing male parts, so that was part of the picture too.
Shakespeare has so many female characters who disguise themselves as boys – boys playing women who disguise themselves as boys. Clearly he was fascinated by role-playing gender/sex.
Men Story Hour? Dad Story Hour? Gay Men Story Hour? Clown Story Hour? Firefighter Story Hour? Nurse Story Hour? Dancer Story Hour? What possible reason is there to organize story hours featuring only drag queens?
And then of course there’s Rosalind, a female character disguised as a man who “pretends” to be a woman to help Orlando woo Rosalind. Shakespeare had layers.
As for why drag kings aren’t a thing, I dunno. But historically when women dressed as men it was for much higher stakes (e.g., to go to war), and these days, at least in the west, it’s not all that unusual to see women wearing “men’s” clothes. Perhaps it’s because things that are considered feminine tend to be seen as frivolous and self-centered, while things that are considered masculine are seen as tough or practical or powerful.
Could it be that there actually are two sexes and one has historically dominated the other so that the one gets to poke fun of the other and not vice versa?
Nah.
That’s certainly what it looks like to the untutored eye, isn’t it.
Maroon:
Drag ‘kings’ definitely were a thing. Music halls and vaudeville had plenty of them. Modern drag queens have grown into a whole phenomenon of their own.
But…contemporary drag has massive baggage of misogyny wired into it. When are we going to have Blackface Minstrel Story Hour? Frito Bandito Story Hour? etc.
The other thing about Shakespeare’s time is that there were women acting in some countries; it wasn’t universal. The world does (and did) consist of more than the English speaking countries.
Two of our theatres are doing Twelfth Night this season; at least one of them has billed it as examining gender-nonconformity. I suspect there is at least some rewriting to make it more “woke”, especially since it is at one of the universities, and especially since the instructor directing it always rewrites Shakespeare, and never well. He omitted Prospero’s closing speech in The Tempest, and changed the ending so Prospero died.
And where else outside of the usual drag performance showcases are drag queens featuring themselves as drag queens per se? Why does it look like the important thing is having access to children? Why is it so important that children be exposed to what had been, until recently, an exclusively adult form of entertainment, and a pointedly sexualized one at that?
I remember reading years ago that suggested that when we dress up animals in human garb, it is twe can laugh at them for failing to be human, as if the animals themselves were trying to be human of their own volition, and not cutting it. Drag queens aren’t doing the same thing, but I think there is a connection, in that women aren’t considered to be fully human. Men are the norm, women are other, and lesser. The exaggerated, stereotypical, sexualized image of “woman” becomes a costume that can be put on, like children changing the wardrobe on a paper doll.
.
Some people have got the memo that racism is Bad, but sexism is still considered Good Clean Fun. That’s why transactivism has to tie itself in knots trying to avoid and discredit the Dolezal comparison. There’s no obvious reason why TiMs are given blanket immunity from the same type criticisms for “identifying” into an oppressed demographic leveled at Rachel Dolezal’s LARPing as an African American.
That. It’s a step down, so that’s funny. A step up isn’t funny, it’s just what you do, if you can.
Count me in among those that find it odd that DQSH even exists in the first place, especially as an organized movement vs. an individual drag queen who just enjoys reading to children.
As for why drag queens are a bigger thing than drag kings, I’m not discounting the other reasons given, but I think part of it is because it’s more of an interesting change in that direction. Let’s see, we’ve got men, who often can barely be bothered to shower and comb their hair, and we’ve got women who sometimes (but, yes, not always or even mostly!) routinely spend an hour or more “decorating” themselves with hair styles, makeup, fancy clothes, etc. What’s more of an interesting contrast, men piling on all the “feminine” accoutrements to look radically different or women not doing much with their appearance, which a lot do them do sometimes or always anyway? Women generally wear what men wear. Even women wearing something like a suit and top hat just looks like an edgy fashion choice, nothing at all like a man in full face makeup and a dress. A drag king could try to go as manly as possible, as, say, a burly lumberjack. But is that interesting? There are probably a bunch of burly female lumberjacks out there these days, so it wouldn’t even be obvious that a man is being portrayed. So what are we down to now, fake beards?
Interesting doesn’t make it right, though, and I agree with people that find drag to be the equivalent of blackface. The parallels to the early, most-offensive, minstrel blackface are striking. Now almost any skin darkening is labeled blackface, but the original blackface involved performers painting themselves up as caricatures of Black people and then acting out stereotypical “Black” behavior to crowds who found it hilarious. Sound familiar? The whole point of blackface was to mock Black people, but we’re supposed to believe men dressing to look like caricatures of women and then walking, talking, and otherwise acting “like women” is not mocking women? It’s literally exactly the same thing as minstrel blackface, just targeting a different group.
It can be quite funny when women do an exaggerated ripped-undershirt scratching armpits kind of drag, which I’m sure I’ve seen examples of but I can’t recall specifics offhand. Stanley Kowalski kind of thing.
And to do that, they had to turn women into a non-marginalized community of oppressors. Without that shift of viewpoint, it would not work.