The world is a horribly sexist and misogynistic place, even in our year of 2018. We all know this, and hopefully if you’ve stumbled your way onto a blog like this, you’re already actively doing something abut it. A big driver for me in embarking on this project was to question how contemporary Drag interacts with contemporary feminism. Does part of the intrinsic charm of Drag still lie in seeing men dress in a way that lowers their social standing? Casting our gaze back a couple hundred years in history, the answer is definitely yes.
When Shakespeare was writing back in the 1590s, all female roles were played by men. Girls and women were portrayed by youths, and older women were comically portrayed by men. This glass ceiling was then thankfully shattered by Nell Gywn in the late 1600s, as most of us who have taken any sort of theatre history are likely to know. But the tradition of men playing women for comic effect has stayed steadfast ever since. This week, I focused my reading into a facet of clowning I discovered; the Pantomime Dame. The origin of the Pantomime Dames date back before Shakespeare, the earliest of which being a character named “Mrs. Noah” in the religious miracle plays of the middle ages. Pantomime is a type of storytelling that is similar to clown, but more structured. The Pantomime plays tell a fable or folk story, most often meant for children, with a beginning, middle, and end, and often incorporate a moral or lesson of some kind. While this is radically different from the similarities I could draw between clown and Drag, as neither adhere much to script or pre-set structure, a commonality I observed last week surfaces again in Pantomime:
“The element of “novelty” has always been to the forefront, as has its ability to encompass modern trends and topicality…”
(The History of the Pantomime – Unnamed Author)
It is the novel, unusual and by effect comical nature of the Pantomime Dame that I argue unifies the three (Clown, Drag and Pantomime). While the novelty was apparent in the 1600-1900s, as it would be out of the question (as far as I know) for men to dress up as women in any appropriate social context, or for a trans person to express their identity at all. This leaves the question of modern sexism on the table – what is the joy in seeing someone openly disobey gender constructs? Now that the idea of a Drag Queen isn’t new or novel to most, what then is the appeal, and where does the impulse lie in gay men to disobey society by putting on a dress and a wig? A drag show contains similar key aspects to clown and pantomime shows, but has its own added layer of social commentary intrinsically woven into it. While this is also arguably true of Pantomime Dames as well, as their comedy also comes from disobeying social convention, the Drag Queen is in on the joke in a different way.
The problem I feel is emerging in contemporary Drag shows (in large part, I believe because of the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race) is that some of this biting social commentary is lost; speaking from personal experience, I was initially infatuated with the idea of drag simply because I felt that I wanted to live life as a beautiful woman instead of a gay man. Upon self reflection, I was to check myself and realize that that belief itself is sexist, rather than progressive. It is ignorant of me to think my life would be any easier as a trans person, or drag queen. And how do trans persons fit into this discussion of gender politics? I am eager to continue this line of questioning because I believe the root of misogyny runs deep in drag culture. How can we as gay men claim progressiveness when our performance as “Queens” still encompasses reinforcing harmful stereotypes about what it is to be “feminine”. As more and more baby gays are being introduced to drag not in bars, but on TV, how does drag culture shift?
All this and more as I continue my exploration. Thank you for bearing with me this week, and I am excited to continue this conversation in the future.
DRAM501 Drag Thesis Blog 