Queering Drag , livre ebook

Queering Drag
Queering Drag
REDEFINING THE DISCOURSE OF
GENDER-BENDING
MEREDITH HELLER
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2020 by Meredith Heller
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
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ISBN 978-0-253-04565-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04566-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04567-6 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
1 What s in a Name?
Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending
2 Masculine Women, Feminine Men :
Variety and Vaudevillian Male Impersonators
3 Mythical, Sexless Characters:
Identity Borders in El Teatro Campesino
4 The First Punch at Stonewall:
Counteridentification Butch Acts
5 Bent Means Not Quite Straight :
Kinging as Disidentification
Conclusion:
Bending Rhetoric
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD BE honored to acknowledge the contributions of the following people, groups, and institutions to the process of constructing this book:
My most respected and trusted mentors: Laury Oaks and Paul Jagodzinski.
My best friends and most trusted collaborators: Rose Elfman and Ryan Bowles Eagle.
My interlocutors: Richelle South; Andrew Henkes; The Beauty Kings; the performers, audience participants, and organizers of Bent and the Drag King Contest; and the individuals who accompanied me to drag shows.
My colleagues: Julie Moreau, Nishant Upadhyay, core and affiliated Women s and Gender Studies faculty and staff at Northern Arizona University, and Sanjam Ahluwalia, who has been extremely supportive of this project.
My community: the much loved and missed Maxine Heller, Cynthia Heller, Matt Rudig and Sitka Rudig, Megan Coe, Lisa Cohen, Christy Simonian Bean, Kane Anderson, Dave Eagle, Julio P rez Centeno, Steve Attewell, the Eagle family, the Bowles family, and the Fields family.
My dissertation committee at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB): Christina McMahon, Leila Rupp, and Suk-Young Kim; many thanks also to my Feminist Studies graduate advisors, Leila Rupp and Phoebe Rupp.
The reviewers of this manuscript, who offered kind critiques and insightful suggestions while also raising up a junior colleague. And the supportive staff, editors, and board members of Indiana University Press.
The students in my graduate course on the politics of gender-bending, whose conversations about queer worldmaking helped me work through several theoretical positions; the many students who watched drag videos in my classes and debated their queer aspects and genderfucking potential; the brilliant and eager undergraduate students I have worked with who continually remind me of the value and importance of my job.
Many archival resources: the Queer Music Heritage Archives, developed and curated by JD Doyle; the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, specifically the El Teatro Campesino collections; and the UCSB Library, especially the staff and services that facilitated loans of microfilmed historical newspapers. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Music Division of the New York Public Library Digital Collections, the open-content program through the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute (the Getty), and Vanessa Adams all generously allowed the use of images.
The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Northern Arizona University, which supported the final stage of this project with a book-finishing grant. At the dissertation-completion level, this project was financially supported by UCSB through a summer research travel grant, a Graduate Opportunities Fellowship, a Doctoral Scholars Fellowship, and a Dean s Advancement Fellowship. I also wish to acknowledge the graduate teaching assistantships I received from the departments of Theater and Black Studies and the graduate teaching assistantships and postgraduation adjunct teaching work I received from the Department of Feminist Studies. I especially thank Eileen Boris and Ingrid Banks for giving me some of these critical work opportunities.
The UAW Local 2865-the union that organizes TAs, readers, and tutors across the UC system-which helped me thrive in a safe and equitable work environment.

A portion of chapter 3 appeared as Gender-Bending in El Teatro Campesino (1968-1980): A Mestiza Epistemology of Performance, in Gender and History 24, no. 3 (2012): 766-781 (John Wiley and Sons). A portion of chapter 5 appeared as Female-Femmeing: A Gender- Bent Performance Practice, in QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 3 (2015): 1-23 ( 2015 Michigan State University). Ideas related to this project and its future directions appeared briefly in Is She He? Drag Discourses and Drag Logic in Online Media Reports of Gender Variance, in Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 3 (2016): 445-459 (Taylor and Francis). I presented portions of this research at the following conferences and institutions: the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Popular Culture/American Culture Association, the National Women s Studies Association, and UCSB.
I completed this project on a nontenure faculty track, mostly teaching a 4/4 course load while completing significant service and other research. Thus this project was made possible by stealing from my leisure time, carving around grading sessions and committee work, and waking ever earlier to write. Without disregarding my own tenacity and sacrifice, I must also point out that I completed this project because I had unearned resources and advantages such as food and housing security, affordable health care, labor protection, institutional access, freedom from state violence, and networks of people who could gift me their uncompensated intellectual labor. Those in contingent faculty positions with less access to these critical resources because of racist, sexist, heterosexist, cis-sexist, and ableist barriers might not be able to complete such a project, despite tenacity and sacrifice. The work we do to explore cultural structures and social relations and then create community knowledges is crucial. My hero Audre Lorde says that without community, there can be no liberation. Our own community must become a coalitional pathway that lifts everyone up to intellectual liberation.
Finally, I thank George Heller for valuing the education and intellectual achievement of young people.
PREFACE
I WAS INVITED to speak on the NPR-hosted Southern California Public Radio show AirTalk for a segment called Is Drag Degrading to Women? Mary Cheney had posed this question on Facebook after watching a commercial for RuPaul s Drag Race. Cheney wondered if drag might parallel blackface minstrelsy in dehumanizing and degrading the subject performed. Cheney s post was polarizing. One side-comprising journalists, performers, academics, and RuPaul herself-argued that drag queening did not degrade women because, as a form of queer identification, celebration, and pride, it was specifically about tearing down gender walls. 1 The other side took a more ambivalent position: drag could perhaps degrade women if that were the intention of or effect from a misogynistic performer, or even a performer who was not fully vigilant about noting and combating sexism. 2 In this view, drag queens must have consciously antisexist intentions and use careful performance methods to ensure that this important queer community ritual does not become a sexist spectacle. 3
I assume I was asked to participate in the segment because of my faculty position in women s and gender studies. My co-guest commentator was professional drag queen Miz Cracker (now even more famous for being the fourth runner-up on season ten of Drag Race ). I suppose it would have been ideal for us to argue opposing sides, but it turned out we largely agreed. Rather than offering up a definitive yes, sexist or no, never, Miz Cracker and I talked about the scope of theatrical gender-bending practices that do not (in fact, currently cannot) fit into the popular image of drag cultivated on Drag Race :
Drag performance is not just a simple version of drag queening as a man performing as a woman or drag kinging as a woman performing as a man. Drag means bending identities like gender, sex, sexual orientation, queering those relationships and those identities. . . . Some drag queens perform with full beards; we don t see that on RuPaul s Drag Race . We don t see any drag kings on RuPaul s Drag Race , we see very few trans individuals performing drag on RuPaul s Drag Race . So the type of drag that Mary Cheney was talking about, which is what she sees on RuPaul s Drag Race , might be degrading to women . . . but it s certainly not the breadth and scope of the type of drag that is performed. 4

So, is drag degrading to women? It really depends on what we mean when we say drag. Chandra Mohanty reminds us of the urgent need to examine the political implications of analytic strategies and principles. 5 So this book illuminates the sc