I have been intending to write this post since seeing La Cage aux Folles at a local theater, which sparked a thought about how much of what we think of as “gender” is really just a performance.
The central idea of that musical is a cabaret with drag performers. The owners are a gay couple, one of which is the queen of all the drag queens. (Performed with aplomb by local theater veteran and co-owner of Ovation Theatre, Jason McClain.)
Drag itself is a performance, of course, and differs from reality. It isn’t really about cross dressing, for example, and certainly isn’t an expression of being transgender. As a cishet guy, I am probably ill qualified to parse the difference between drag as a queer art and as a mainstream art form - and I have been informed there is a difference. But I do think that it can shed some light on gender as a performance, which affects all of us as humans.
The bottom line is this:
Gender is a performance, just like drag, and has virtually nothing to do with biology.
In other words, we as humans do a lot of social signaling with gender performances. The specifics of the signals vary greatly from culture to culture, change over time, and take on meanings that have zero connection to the inherent meaning of the signals.
Just one example: pink used to be a “male” color as recently as 150 years ago, and blue was a “female” color. Clearly that has changed. And there is nothing inherently “masculine” about a particular wavelength of light and the color that our eyes perceive from that wavelength.
Everything about this is just cultural signaling.
What drag does is switch the signals, with men adopting an exaggerated set of “female” social signals, and women doing the opposite.
As art, this makes sense: art both reflects and critiques reality, and always has. By switching the signals, drag creates frisson, discomfort, and asks us to question our assumptions about what male and female actually are.
The thing is, male and female humans are far more alike than they are different, and, with very few exceptions, these “differences” are at the statistical level, rather than the individual one. For example, males are statistically taller than females, but a great many females are taller than a great many males. (Me included: I’m 5’7”, so about 15% of US women are taller than me. That’s about 19 million women in this country who are taller than me.)
While height is fairly strongly associated statistically with sex, other traits have virtually zero correlation. For example, intelligence, leadership ability, emotionality. Despite this, our social beliefs assign traits along gendered lines, leading to a general cultural belief that men are better than women in roles that come with higher wages and social status. (Including the fact that we still haven’t had a female president.)
Back to drag.
First, I want to mention an observation by Carson McCullers, who probably would identify as non-binary now. Humans before puberty, and in old age, look pretty much the same, whether male, female, or intersex.
If you were to give a boy and a girl the same haircut, and dress them in the same clothes, they would look alike. And, if you raised them the same, they would largely act the same. (As the father of female children who could mix it up and get dirty with the best of the boys, I know this to be true.) The “differences” we see are at most at the statistical level, and, more likely, entirely due to socialization, not inherent differences.
Likewise, shave beard and hair off an old woman and an old man and dress them in baggy clothes, and it would be harder than you think to tell them apart.
What we are left with is a handful of secondary sex characteristics. Some of those are also merely statistical. Even as a teen, I had more hips than some girls. Some women have flatter chests than some men. (Breast reduction surgery is performed most on cisgender males, by the way.) Some men struggle to grow facial hair, while some women grow it. My wife’s voice is essentially in the same range as mine. The list goes on.
Thus, it is actually fairly easy to swap the signals. Makeup is mostly associated with femininity in our culture, so put some on. Get a wig. Wear a dress. And, more than anything, adopt the mannerisms that are coded as “female” in our culture. Exaggerate them, and you have a drag queen. That’s really all there is to it.
Because we humans are masters of picking up tiny differences, some people are better able to “pass” when performing. A tall man looks less like a woman to us, for example. (Something that causes problems for cisgender women who tend to be tall. Hate and bigotry toward transgender women often spills over into hostility toward any woman who doesn’t look “feminine” enough.) So the degree of “passing” will vary.
Drag is about exaggeration, over-signalling, not passing, although some performers definitely are incredible at the illusion. And it is the illusion that is the source of discomfort for certain people.
Because drag reveals that most of what we culturally experience as gender is mere artifice, mere signaling, it also invites us to consider what else in our culture is mere artifice, mere signaling. Or perhaps mere prejudice and a desire to keep people “in their lane.”
If femininity is a performance, then perhaps not all women prefer to be mothers, or love cooking and cleaning, or are okay with lower salaries. If masculinity is a performance, then perhaps men are not “naturally” unavailable emotionally, or naturally violent.
I have been thinking about why it is that right wingers are currently losing their ever-loving shit over drag queens.
Surely it isn’t an objection to acting performances generally. I mean, Jim Caviezel is not literally Jesus Christ, and people still went and saw that movie. And since right wingers at least claim to like Shakespeare, one has to assume that they are okay with all of his gender bending (to say nothing of the fact that males played all the female roles in Shakespeare’s day.)
Although I am sure it is a reaction to the LGBTQ rights movement, and drag queens are seen as an easy target, I’m not even sure it is entirely that. Not all drag performers are gay, after all. (Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy were and are heterosexual, as far as I can tell, and their drag performances on the big screen are well known.)
I think, rather, that it is because drag queens blur the distinction between genders, and invite that questioning of cultural gender roles and gender essentialism that is the issue. Right now, we are in an age of reactionism. The right wing wishes to undo the social progress of the past 100 years, and put women and minorities firmly back in their place, and LGBTQ people firmly back in the closet.
Drag queens, by revealing that gender is a performance, open the possibility that “traditional” (aka Victorian middle class white) gender roles are not the only way to “be a man” or “be a woman.” They suggest that there are many ways to live our lives.
And that is scaring the ever-loving shit out of right wingers.
The story of my own family is illustrative of this.
My wife is, by any reasonable definition, a cisgender woman. She has literally given birth to five children. She dresses in a way that our culture codes as feminine. She has longer hair than mine. She wears makeup most of the time. Within the framework of our mainstream culture here in 21st Century America, she socially signals her femininity just fine as far as appearances go.
However, she doesn’t fit with the behavioral stereotypes of our culture. When we were preparing for marriage, we got some premarital counseling with an MFT, who gave us a series of personality tests. This was quite fun to do together, honestly, and also gave us important insights into each other that have been highly beneficial in our marriage. (I highly recommend getting secular premarital counseling before marriage or even cohabiting. It really does help with relationship skills.)
One of those tests involved personality traits that code as masculine or feminine in our culture.
I graded out fairly close to evenly balanced between masculine and feminine - I have traits that our society sees as one or the other.
My wife graded out as 90% masculine.
Yep, I’m very much the “girl” in our relationship.
Understanding these traits helped us understand each other. And also understand that these were cultural interpretations, not inherent gendered traits. (In fact, many of my “feminine” traits would have been considered “masculine” at other times in history - for all their faults, the Victorians valued emotion in men.)
What this does mean, however, is that my wife’s confidence, assertiveness, lack of manipulation and game-playing can get her labeled certain ways in our culture. Those traits are more valued in women than they used to be, but we have a long way to go still. They do, however, make her a good boss, which is why once the kids could handle her working day shift, she moved to management. (And she was definitely actively recruited.)
Unfortunately, these same traits did not endear her to my mother, who has strong opinions about how women should perform “femininity.” These are also tied up with fundamentalist authoritarian religion for her, so failure to do things her way is also seen as defying God Almighty.
My wife continued to work after the kids were born. We split breadwinning and childcare more equally. I took on a good bit of the cooking duties (at least until the kids were able to assist - now we each cook one day out of the week). Neither of us loves housework, so our house isn’t particularly spotless. My wife refused to see her body as a dirty source of (male) sin, and wore normal, flattering clothes. She didn’t spend her time as a mother freaking out about our kids experiencing pop culture of their generation. She didn’t act submissive, but like anyone’s equal. And, she advocated for herself openly, without resorting to manipulation and emotional blackmail (the way women of a certain generation were taught to do.) And, perhaps most unforgivable of all, she told my mom “no.”
I really makes me sad that my mom chose to destroy a relationship over gender performance, but that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, when you believe you know the mind of God, your own cultural preferences become a divine mandate. And when you love your cultural preferences more than you love a child, you pick needless and senseless fights.
We are also seeing this play out in our nation, with the right wing entirely sure that women are performing gender incorrectly, and need to get back to popping out [white] babies, staying in abusive marriages, and after they can no longer give birth, being unpaid child care workers. Certainly they shouldn’t be pursuing careers - women’s value is entirely tied up in their ability to make more humans. I have never before in my life seen this much vitriol directed at childless women.
That same hatred toward women who won’t (or can’t) reproduce is behind the drag queen panic. Even by existing, both assert that femininity isn’t limited to one performance, or one system of one’s body. That there are many ways of living and of being a man or a woman (or neither.) And as a corollary, that women should be valued as humans, not as mere reproducers.
So, get out and see a drag performance. Maybe go to one of those Drag Queen Story Hours if you have one in your area. Enjoy the artistry, the exaggeration. Relish those feelings of discomfort - that’s the social indoctrination you have had all your life experiencing cognitive dissonance. And ask yourself just how many of your beliefs about gender are really just cultural prejudice. If you are honest with yourself, you will see a lot when you open your eyes.
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