helen has been pondering on how ironically some radical feminists and trans women find common ground: their hatred of drag queens—and was wondering why some trans women find drag queens so threatening.
I thought Daniel Harris, in “The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture,” made a pretty asute observation:
If traditional forms of drag tended to dress upscale, aiming to achieve the glamour and elegance of the inaccessibly remote celebrity, more contemporary forms of drag dress downscale, revolving around the absense of glamour and elegance, around the barbaric and the crude, the beer-can curler, bunny bedroom slippers, and ratty negligees of bedraggled housewives. It is perhaps because kitsch plays such an important political function in the aesthetic of contemporary drag that many feminists mistakenly believe that drag queen are misogynistic, when in fact they are taunting, not women in particular, but complacent hetrosexuals in general. The drag queen orchestrates a brilliant stylistic reprisal against the leisure-suited chauvinists sitting in the Naugahyde La-Z-Boys beneath the velvet paintings, exacting an eye for an eye, a clutch purse for a clingy tube top.” (Pg. 214)
(That’s not to say some drag queens aren’t misogynistic. Unfortunately, I’m seen some myself. FWIW, I find that’s more common in the “shock drag” types that Harris talks about than among old school “glamour queens” like myself—though the latter can be prone to “women these days just don’t know how to look good, act feminine, etc.” sexism. Again, I think Harris offers another good insight: “This new breed of drag queen is so ambivalent about the stereotypically effeminate behavior of the old-style swish that he attempts to deflate his costome, turning it into a knee-slapping farce.” It’s similar to the inevitable buffoonary of straight guys who crossdress for Halloween, or a fundraiser or because they lost a bet—it’s a way of signaling, “this is just for laughs, I’m not doing it because I might actually enjoy wearing a dress, no sirree, not at all.”
For trans women there’s of course the whole conflation issue that Jude touched on over at helen’s blog—i.e. often gay men and occasionally lesbians just assume “hat the way I move through the world is one big performance that I will be ending at some point by pulling off a wig and declaring in a husky voice ‘fooled you!’” (Ironically, Jude says this never happens in straight circles.)
But I also wonder if there’s not an element of envy for some. If you were closeted for years, obsessed with passing and fitting in, to see someone who just doesn’t give shit if someone sees her as a guy in a dress, who seeks to be the center of attention… well I can see how that could trigger a lot of envy.
