Last week, I went to UW's "Drag me to the Bomber", an event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their gay and lesbian alliance club. I had never been to one before, and besides wanting to support my friends in the gay community, I was also rather curious about what a drag show would entail.
Well, I loved it! And as I was watching, I started viewing these talented men and women as individuals remixing gender. They not only bend traditional views on femininity and masculinity, they sometimes do this through the use of such clever devices as satire.
For example, the drag queens in this show not only take stereotype of "flamboyantly feminine" that is commonly thought to be a characteristic of gay men (not to infer that all the drag queens were gay), and they turn it into something over the top and fantastic. All of this to convince us that gender performance is not a constrained thing--what makes a woman with a pony tail any more of a woman than a cross dressed woman with a peacock head dress? According to the drag community, not anything at all and I can't say I disagree with them. Satire in this case is put to great use--by poking fun at the flamboyant stereotype by taking it to the extreme, drag queens have in fact changed the way I view gender performance. It's fantastic!
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