Drag King

Drag kings are (usually) female performers who parody masculinity in a variety of theatrical acts. Drag kings and their performances are mostly found in venues within the gay and lesbian subculture because these spaces provide safe environments for gender play and have maintained historical traditions of queer [Page 227]and culturally subversive performance. Drag kings further emerged through the engagement of women in gender workshops and in response to the introduction of gender studies in academia during the 1980s and 1990s. However, drag kings have more recently transcended their subcultural roots and can be found performing in popular theatrical sites such as in Shakespearean productions, musicals, opera, and film and television productions. Drag kings and their performances contribute to gender and social discourses, including Judith Butler's theory on the performativity of gender, as well as sexual, queer, cultural, and feminist discourses.

Exactly when and where drag kings first emerged is unknown. Rumors have described the first introduction of the term drag king originating as a response to their male counterpart, the drag queen (men performing femininity), and drag queen's influence on popular culture. Another rumor is that the word was coined by Diane Torr, a self-proclaimed performance artist who runs drag king workshops internationally. However the name was created, drag kings have emerged as interesting and prolific queer performers during the last 2 decades.

Many kings emerged, flourished, and influenced future performers by attending masculinity and women-only workshops. These gender workshops were some of the first safe spaces in which women could experiment with masculinity: to slip behind a male façade made up of spirit gum and moustaches to play with hegemonic social structures. These workshops became popular as women from all walks of life strutted their stuff in public; they were literally walking in men's shoes and donning the accoutrements of masculinity completely undetected. From many accounts, however, these workshops seemed to have served as more of a social experiment than as a performance site because the emphasis of the experience was placed on teaching women to “pass” (being perceived as the opposite sex) as men rather than to theatrically “perform” as men, removing the essential elements of drag from the gender play. Some of the participants, however, appropriated masculinity as a site for performance and continued to develop their newly acquired social performance of masculinity into drag acts that became the hallmark of the drag king.

A drag king is a drag artist. A performance convention, drag is essentially the hyper-performance of the socially prescribed performance of gender within cultural axioms. A drag king's purpose is to enact masculine axioms and highlight their absurdity. Drag performance is immersed in gender and predicated upon an assumption of a “fixed” sexed body and its prescriptive social attributions wherein sex and gender performance are normative and congruent; that is, men are masculine, women feminine and heteronormative. Drag interrogates this assumption by revealing the performance as a performance through an absurd theatrical enactment that re-renders gender, sex, and sexuality beyond prescriptive terms.

A drag king is not, as the misconception usually is, a cross-dressed, transgendered, or transsexual person. Drag uses cross-dressing within its acts, but this is fundamentally different. Also, a transgendered or transsexual performer may be a drag king, but it must not be assumed that if a woman wears male attire, she is a drag king. If she wears male attire in a performance highlighting the absurd modes of masculinity set against the backdrop of a “revealed” or “perceived” female body, then she is a woman performing masculinity and, thus, a drag king. This is not to say that only biological women can be drag kings. Some drag king performers are men, men identified as women, and women identified as men who also use masculinity in performance.

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