Drag Performativity

Contested Definition

Some scholars and practitioners assert that the canonical definition of drag, while partially accurate, fails to fully encompass the scope of the genre. A common way of describing drag is to characterize how the actor’s stage gender contrasts with their “real” gender and connected sex assignment. Under this definition, an artist who performs a recognizable version of femininity is a drag queen only if this theatrical look opposes his “real” cis male identity. Relatedly, drag kings are often described as women who replicate masculine stereotypes so to be perceived as “like men” onstage. Some suggest that this definitional framing is connected to a popular characterization of drag as the contemporary manifestation of cross-gender casting and male and female impersonation traditions. Drag is also interchangeably referred to as gender bending and crossdressing for these same reasons. While this definition accurately describes some forms of queening and kinging, it is controversial because it reduces drag to only those acts that produce binary gender, which are done only by people inhabiting the “opposing” gender identity.

In addition to emulating ideas that people are “normally” cis and “naturally” embody certain gender qualities, some also feel this definition excludes some very popular forms of drag. For example, trans women such as Peppermint work as feminine drag queens, and trans men like Lucky Johnson perform as drag kings. People assigned female at birth express a range of queer femininities through faux queening, bio queening, or female femme-ing acts. Some drag artists target oppressive gender norms by creating disjoined or [Page 208]unintelligible identities or presenting gendered aesthetics in tandem with ideologically contradictory body parts, sexualities, or markers of race. For example, Conchita Wurst is a “bearded queen” who cultivates a highly feminine look with a full beard, and drag king Delicio Del Toro performs as a macho Mexican wrestler while exposing breasts. These types of acts, which are often explicitly referred to as drag and are integral to drag events, produce theatrical versions of identity and illustrate various ways identities can be done. In light of these examples, scholars such as Meredith Heller have argued that drag should be defined according to the intentions of its performers and the methods used to bend or otherwise disrupt dominant notions of identity.

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