Being a drag
In Ryan's absence, I've been watching a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race. I've actually watched all three seasons that are available, in full, online, so I am basically "caught up." I've enjoyed these shows because I feel that they help reconnect me with the transgressiveness (no pun intended) of being gay.
Gayness in modern yuppiedom has nothing of the transgressiveness that drag or other approaches to questioning gender binaries continues to have, in the modern eye. Gay yuppies run for political office, go on parental leave, complain about schools, etc., etc. They are indistinguishable from their straight counterparts, and they have frankly no interest in drawing any but the most superficial and self-serving of such distinctions. They are "diverse" without drawing the attention of institutional forces that require conformity, happy to be mere tokens.
But the essence of drag - and I hope this never changes about it - is that it challenges our conceptions of masculinity and femininity, by drawing our attention to the ways in which gender is performed rather than embodied. A "successful" drag performance, as "female impersonation," is one that takes on all the meaningful signifiers of femininity and shows an audience how easily femininity is simulated. This is why, I think, celebrity impersonation meshes the way it does with drag, since celebrity personality is similarly simulated and put-on - there is a "Beyonce," for instance, that is distinct from the person whose performance of "Beyonce" is the one we take to be definitive. Thinking of drag in this way also helps us to understand what's going on with more progressive forms of drag - drags that dispense with full-on female impersonation and start to play instead on the conventions of drag, for example, or "genderfuck," which is its own take on the performative nature of gender. It also helps us to understand drag as a venue for satire - a "drag wedding," for instance, questions not just gender roles but the institution and conventions of marriage. Drag is, at root, still dangerous, not just to one's physical body but to our comfortable assumptions about the way our society is ordered (and it is plain that the two risks are connected).
I wish that being gay in yuppiedom carried that same kind of significance, but it simply doesn't. Instead, I find that my being a bike commuter - bizarrely - puts me much farther outside the mainstream than my being gay does. While my colleagues measure their career advancement as much by the accumulation of status as they do by their spiraling away from the urban center into the suburbs, I embrace an entirely different set of values. Walkability, vibrant neighborhoods, transportation networks that serve humans rather than cars - this is what being a biker has attuned me to, while my colleagues discuss the Frank Lloyd Wright down the street from their new home.
Gayness in modern yuppiedom has nothing of the transgressiveness that drag or other approaches to questioning gender binaries continues to have, in the modern eye. Gay yuppies run for political office, go on parental leave, complain about schools, etc., etc. They are indistinguishable from their straight counterparts, and they have frankly no interest in drawing any but the most superficial and self-serving of such distinctions. They are "diverse" without drawing the attention of institutional forces that require conformity, happy to be mere tokens.
But the essence of drag - and I hope this never changes about it - is that it challenges our conceptions of masculinity and femininity, by drawing our attention to the ways in which gender is performed rather than embodied. A "successful" drag performance, as "female impersonation," is one that takes on all the meaningful signifiers of femininity and shows an audience how easily femininity is simulated. This is why, I think, celebrity impersonation meshes the way it does with drag, since celebrity personality is similarly simulated and put-on - there is a "Beyonce," for instance, that is distinct from the person whose performance of "Beyonce" is the one we take to be definitive. Thinking of drag in this way also helps us to understand what's going on with more progressive forms of drag - drags that dispense with full-on female impersonation and start to play instead on the conventions of drag, for example, or "genderfuck," which is its own take on the performative nature of gender. It also helps us to understand drag as a venue for satire - a "drag wedding," for instance, questions not just gender roles but the institution and conventions of marriage. Drag is, at root, still dangerous, not just to one's physical body but to our comfortable assumptions about the way our society is ordered (and it is plain that the two risks are connected).
I wish that being gay in yuppiedom carried that same kind of significance, but it simply doesn't. Instead, I find that my being a bike commuter - bizarrely - puts me much farther outside the mainstream than my being gay does. While my colleagues measure their career advancement as much by the accumulation of status as they do by their spiraling away from the urban center into the suburbs, I embrace an entirely different set of values. Walkability, vibrant neighborhoods, transportation networks that serve humans rather than cars - this is what being a biker has attuned me to, while my colleagues discuss the Frank Lloyd Wright down the street from their new home.