Drag shows have always bothered me, insulted me as a woman being caricatured. A man showily "doing it better." Having made myself more aware of the transgendered issues and realities, I have come to accept that this is not intentional. Or at least not intended as an insult. And I connected it today to several other cultural phenomenon, a countercultural fad that has mushroomed into industrial toxicity.
There is a book called Body Drama reviewed in a 'zine left in the lounge at work, with two photos, one of a woman, the other a copy - photoshopped to create a size-one bottom. Seen alone, the second would seem normal in a women's fashion spread, next to the real one, it looks freakish, and boyish. And I began to think about uber thin models, and the prevalence of gay men in fashion. Men who would prefer girls to look more like boys, slim hipped, small busted, not a conscious choice. (Female designers, for the most part, prefer boys too.) Curvy, maternal women dressed flatteringly will never be their aim. The other side of fashion, couture - is about art, and the models are hangers for the art, so having to create livable clothes is again, not the point.
Drag queens are all about women writ large, on stage, the female that most brassily appeals to, yes, men. Not all men, certainly, but the kind of man who likes strippers and prostitutes, the obvious, for sale woman, the surface of sexual woman, and is amused and aroused by the exaggeration.
Which suddenly struck me as being akin to clowns. Clowns elicit nervous laughter, a fearful pleasure, an indulgence in stereotypes, obvious humor. Most folks these days don't like clowns, finding them creepy. Which is closer to what I have always felt about drag queens, the appeal completely lost on me. It's all about masks and surfaces, adoring the glamour and the flash, selling the sizzle, painting on a face.
I'll take my own, unadorned.
3 comments:
Since I learnt of it, I've really liked the idea that masculine culture is negative - i.e. the idea of 'being a man' is defined as what you don't do.
Drag acts are often, at heart, based on the idea that a man could only ever do things that are seen as feminine as a joke. And that bugs me too, because I don't like to be told not to do things for arbitrary and prejudiced reasons.
Pacian,
The principle driving "feminism" frees both sexes from arbitrary restrictions. I utterly agree with you.
Cross-dressing's been around a long time: Shakespeare, pantomime, with varying degrees of being taken seriously according to the culture.
A lot of men who'd quail at the idea of being thought gay jump at the chance of putting on women's clothes for a carnaval, fancy dress, etc. Usually a jokey,brassy flouncy middle-aged caricature woman. But a lot of men like to try it out in some wise - even my dad once put my mum's nighty on, I'm told, so she put on his pjs and they slept like that.
Alan Coren once remarked that cross-dressing or even transexual men-to-women often seem to be caught in a bit of a time-warp in terms of female style, adopting a sort of 1950s look (-he said even Jan Morris looked like she bought her clothes at Bourne and Hollingsworthe, an old-style, genteel London store years back). Whether that's because modern casual women's clothes aren't really differently, exaggeratedly 'feminine' enough, or perhaps it's sometimes a bit of a mother thing?
Sometimes the bitchiness of camp humour is uncomfortable, a mysogynistic interpretation and mimicry of how women are perceived.
It always rather puzzled me how very right-on gay men I knew insisted earnestly they didn't want to be seen as wanting to be like women, but very earnestly used to take in fairly awful mediocre drag acts. I think some of it was just a sense of belonging for them really. I never minded going along, or felt particularly uncomfortable, or as though it was hostile.
Parties when gay friends dressed outrageously, in make-up and drag were good fun, I enjoyed the anarchic playfulness of it and often found I could let my hair down in that atmosphere more freely than otherwise. Not something I see a lot of now!
Male actors who develop female characters intelligently,eg Hinge and Brackett, two dry, cultured but slightly catty old spinster ladies, again, caught in rather a time warp of Edwardian spinsterhood, I think are different from the superficiality of the burlesque/grotesques of many drag acts...
Anyway, not a very coherent response, but an interested one!
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