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The Question of Power and Authority in Gender

Performance: Judith Butler’s Drag Strategy
Charlotte Coles (University of Edinburgh)

Once I went through a border with a drag queen, who was

dressed butch to
Pass as a man.
I was dressed femme to pass as a girl
They pulled us over and wanted to see our suitcases.
So we switched suitcases.
He got my suitcase, with suits and ties and letters to girls.
And I got his suitcase with dresses and high heels and poems
to boys.
They passed us through as normal.
(P. Shaw cited in Senelick, 2000, p.490)

So I thought I’d carry another woman’s eggs for her. I don’t

mean I had a market stall. No, for lesbian couples who
couldn’t have children, I had eighteen babies in a period of
three years. I was prolific, I had to have me pelvic floor
laminated. (L. Savage, 2006)

Debates surrounding drag have proved controversial within feminist

thought. When drag queens first emerged as proud symbols of the gay
liberation movement, many felt a need to distance themselves from what, as
they saw it, was a mocking of women. Although drag drew on the
transparent performance of gendered imagery to challenge stereotypes of
gender and sexuality, those performances were (and continue to be) defined
primarily by male mastery of the depiction of highly selective feminine
identities that focus on surface aesthetics (hair, clothing, make-up) rather
than social narratives of family or reproduction. Consequently, feminist
criticism has critiqued drag as the reproduction of a specifically sexualized
rendering of feminine identity, which reflects persistent hierarchies of desire
and desirability: of men dressing as the male-oriented version of women. In
other words, drag performs and sustains forms of femininity which primarily

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serve patriarchal interests. As such, discussions of drag have marked the

cutting-edge between feminist and queer theoretical discourse.
Judith Butler’s discussion in Gender Trouble (1990, pp.79-149)
aroused much controversy by politicising drag as a postmodern tool with
which to radically reassess universalized and reductionist feminist thought.
Although Butler’s subsequent works, notably Bodies That Matter (2004),
have qualified that reliance on drag as the prime example of performative
gender, her original claims provide the strongest argument for drag as a
transgressive strategy. By revisiting Butler’s earlier claims for drag, I want
to argue that the feminist discomfort surrounding drag’s claim to
transgression stems from drag’s role in sustaining retrogressive power
hierarchies, which in turn directs critical attention to the reiterative
persistence of underlying binaries, that is to say, socially created gender
dichotomies. Drag’s failure to escape from existing gender binaries
illustrates the persistence of power hierarchies within which that attempt
takes place.
Butler’s theory will be broken down into four broad themes to form
the structure of the discussion: the disintegration of the subject, the creation
of new narratives, the denaturalization of the body and the breakdown of
compulsory heterosexuality. I argue that Butler’s assumption that drag
exposes the instability of the subject needs to be scrutinized; not any drag
will do. Butler’s analysis of drag fails to take fully into account the
actualities and consequences of the binary hierarchy of power. Leading from
this contention, I argue that drag can create a greater space within feminist
discourse for creation of progressive gender norms, but that this is by no
means certain. Drag is ambiguous in its meaning, expression and
consequences; a laissez-faire attitude towards gender expression should not
be taken. On that basis, I offer a recognition of drag’s work in bringing the
body back into feminist discourse, but argue that the female body should not
become obscured by its parody. Finally, I want to assert that drag can be

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useful in critiquing compulsory heterosexuality, but with the proviso that

drag should not simply be used to colonize female sexuality. Throughout
these explorative sections runs an argument for a qualified acceptance of
drag as a transgressive strategy, alongside the recognition that this strategy is
influenced by gender hierarchies which affect the material lives of humans
gendered as women. Drag can, and does, fail to transcend oppressive norms
at times, as it cannot escape its context. Drag does, however, expose the
need to accept in all feminist strategies the diversity and plurality of female
gendered, classed, racial and sexualized experience.

The integrity of the subject under interrogation

One of Butler’s claims is that central elements of second wave feminism
make too concrete the unstable category of woman. Through the promotion
of the female gender as socially constructed, feminists began to ask what
was involved in creating a woman. For example, feminists such as Gilligan
(1982) wrote of a conception of women as developing through mothering
and a greater capacity for morality and empathy. Postmodernist feminists
(Butler, 1990; Flax, 1987) have criticized this strand of feminist theory by
pointing out, firstly, that by defining what constitutes a woman, the theorists
are merely replacing Enlightenment thought with their own brand of
foundationalist truths surrounding the integrity of the subject woman and,
secondly, that by creating inside and outside spaces, where only the outside
(gender) can be deconstructed, but the inside (sex) is essentialized, sexual
binaries remain out of reach of transformation. Butler uses drag to
problematize these assumptions and provide the possibility of transgressing
gender categories and sex/gender binaries.
The argument against the integrity of the subject runs along the
following lines. Gender is constructed through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’
which ‘founds and consolidates the subject’ (Butler, 1990, p.140). Butler
challenges the notion of a presumptive ‘I’ that does its gender, a

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presumption Beauvoir (1953) is making when she posits that one becomes a
‘woman’(Beauvoir, S. cited in Butler, 1990, p.141) . For Butler, there is no
original subject behind gender expressions, no performer behind the mask of
performance: the ‘I’ only emerges through performative gender relations
(2004, p.338). By providing a pastiche of repeated gender actions, drag
‘mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender
identity’ (Butler, 1990, p.137). Drag dramatizes and makes explicit
mundane, everyday gender rituals and, through this repetition of gendered
actions, suggests that essentialist presumptions about correct or authentic
genders can be reworked (Butler, 1990, p.338); the sight of a person with
male genitalia reproducing femininity makes apparent the social
mechanisms of gender oppression so that an audience can see its workings.
By parodying a gender performance with no original, drag questions the
‘ontological integrity of the subject’ woman as authentic and essential
(Butler, 1990, p.325). If identity is constructed through a compulsory
repetition, then drag’s transgressive quality can be seen ‘within the
possibility of a variation on that repetition’ (Butler, 1990, p.145). Drag can
be read as a disloyalty to traditional gender expressions, thereby denying
claims of the essential nature of gender.
This disloyal repetition of authentic identity can be seen in a number
of drag performances. Butler opens her chapter on drag in Gender Trouble
(1990) with description of Greta Garbo. Garbo is viewed within the gay
community as high camp (Newton, 1979, p.103); a drag act of sorts. She is
uber-femme, beyond any naturalistic portrayal of femininity. As such, she
uses gender icons and signifiers to show up ‘authentic’ feminine
performance as just that, a performance. Equally, the camped-up portrayals
of masculinity in gay culture - the cowboy, the sailor - denaturalize more
ordinary portrayals of masculinity and confuse notions of authenticity in
judging gender expressions (Edwards, 1994, p.49). Butler uses the
documentary Paris is Burning (1990), which tells the stories of various

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participants of underground Drag Balls in New York in the late 1980s, to

provide examples of performances which confuse and transcend gender
norms. The petite Venus Xtravaganza passes easily for a young white
woman; she can reproduce femininity with ultra realness (a term used within
the drag ball community to signify the ability to represent very closely a
particular gender image) and yet is officially the wrong sex, thereby
confusing the notion of a correct or authentic sex.
Drag thus pulls biological sex into the gendered gaze; ‘drag fully
subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic spaces’ (Butler,
1990, p.137). Traditionally, what is outside – appearance, sex role – has
been separated from what is inside – essence, genital sex. Butler argues that
this is a false distinction and that female impersonators point out its arbitrary
nature. A character from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch provides a
useful study in exploring this idea: Yitzhak is biologically female but
dresses as a man, thus hir (outside) appearance or sex role is masculine but
hir (inside) essence or sex is female. One day s/he gets a job as a drag queen
and s/he begins to dress as a woman, thus hir (outside) appearance becomes
female but it is made clear that hir (inside) essence remains male. Drag’s
affect is thus to ‘wrench the sex roles loose from that which supposedly
determines them, that is, genital sex’ (Newton, 1979, p.103). Transgender
debates are at the forefront of the political battle to make gender less
dependent on anatomy. Recently in New York, a law was amended to allow
people to alter the sex on their birth certificate without having to have sex-
change surgery (Cave, 2001). In this very concrete way, drag is proving
itself to be a transgressive strategy to break down rigid gender categories.
Butler’s use of drag to destabilize an emphasis on the subject has
become the focus of a variety of critiques. For some, taking Butler’s theories
to their end-point leaves the feminist project without a protagonist and hence
at a dead-end. Postmodernism is accused of ‘deconstructing everything and
refusing to construct anything’ (Alcoff cited in Nicholson, 1992, p.62) in the

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way that it dissolves the identity of woman into the gendered expressions
which create it and does not give back any base from which to launch
practical political action. Benhabib (1995) worries that, if there is nothing
behind our gender performance, we will never have the agency to initiate
political change. However, these theorists potentially stand open to charges
of essentialism as they attempt to define who is a woman and who is not.
Perhaps a more nuanced riposte to Butler’s argument that drag can
confuse gender oppression can be found in the writing of bell hooks (1992).
She argues that there are power relations at work within a patriarchal society
which affect the way we should view drag, namely that: ‘To choose to
appear as “female” when one is male is always constructed…as a loss, as a
choice worthy only of ridicule’ (hooks, 1992, p.145). She follows Butler in
analysing Paris is Burning but presents a radically different interpretation.
hooks sees the drag performances represented in the documentary as
sustaining gender and racial oppression through the formulation of white,
affluent femininity as the ‘holy grail’ of what it means to be a woman. As
hooks argues, the ‘combination of class and race longing that privileges the
“femininity” of the ruling-class white women…does not provide a critique
of patriarchy’ (1992, p.147). Power is always at play, and recognition of this
is evident in some of the testimonials from the drag queens in the
documentary themselves. One experienced drag queen commented that he
would never become a woman: ‘just cause you get a pussy, don’t mean life’s
going to be great’ (Paris is Burning, 1990). This view reflects an
acknowledgement that to live in the world as a woman means a certain loss
of power (hooks, 1992, p.145). This point is also made by Harper (1994)
who points out that the drag queens in Paris is Burning found it very hard to
alter their fundamental social experiences outside the drag ball context.
Butler’s subversion can be seen as rather a limited rebellion which fails to
subvert economic and material identities or change social actualities.

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Examples can be found in the analysis of drag to support the counter

argument that drag fails to transgress traditional, patriarchal gender norms.
Butler assumes that, when Venus Xtravaganza was murdered, she was killed
for being transgendered. Another interpretation could be that Venus was
killed for being a woman. Posing this interpretation highlights the danger
that Butler’s conception of drag may obscure the gendered and raced
oppression that women experience through their less-favoured position in
society. In Esther Newton’s Mother Camp (1979) it is interesting to note
that, off-stage, the more ‘high-end’ drag queens were rather conservative,
middle-class men who usually kept their boxers on underneath their female
clothing as a sign that they were still men in costume. In a sense, then, these
drag queens fail to meaningfully represent femininity, as female gender is
also constructed through the concrete social experience of being on the
losing end of the power duality in society. hooks argues persuasively when
she states that ‘donning women’s clothes displays no love or identification
with women’ but instead is a ‘cynical mockery’ (1992, p.147). When
analysing drag, one has to be aware of the power relations that lie behind
and within the performance which may lead to an amplification of gender
oppression rather than a transgression of gender categories, something that
Butler’s early account of drag fails to do.

A Dizzying Accumulation of Narratives

So far, it has been accepted that identity politics can be universalizing and
reductionist, but that drag also has the capacity to be gender oppressive and
should always be analysed with the effects of material social experiences in
mind. We now move on to explore another strand of Butler’s theory: that by
making ontological judgements about which genders should be considered
authentic, one is perpetrating a form of ‘dehumanising violence’ upon
genders which are considered bogus (Butler, 2004, p.217). To live ‘outside’
the culturally acceptable boundaries of gender is a dangerous business, as

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can be seen in the lives of drag queens as described by Newton, documented

in Paris is Burning and fictionalized in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. She
argues that past feminist theory has ‘created unity only through a strategy of
exclusion’ (Butler, 2004, p.206) by failing to see gender as only one identity
among many others such as race, class, ethnicity, age and sexuality. This
excludes women who do not identify themselves as women in the terms set
out by feminist theory from other cultural positions (Butler, 1990a, p.325).
Butler asserts that, by confusing gender norms, drag has the effect of
‘proliferating gender configurations’ (1990, p.146) and works to challenge
the idea that it is only through the materialization of a coherent sex that one
becomes culturally viable.
The lives of drag queens are symbols of the fantastic variety of
gender identity which exists in the world. The disidentification displayed
proudly by drag queens can, in Butler’s eyes, facilitate a reconceptualization
of gender (Butler, 1993, p.2). The moving image of Hedwig (the drag queen
protagonist of the Hedwig and the Angry Inch who has neither a vagina nor
penis) walking naked into the distance at the end of the film leaves the
audience with the message that s/he is neither man nor woman and that this
is okay. In another study of drag queens, When the Girls are Men (Taylor
and Rupp, 2005), Sushi, a long time drag queen, talks about the fact that,
after passing for a while as a woman, she realized that wanting to wear
women’s clothes did not mean she wanted to be a woman: it meant she
wanted to be a drag queen. This recognition is eloquently summarized in the
novel Stone Butch Blues by a fictional butch who had sex realignment to
become a man:

I simply became a he – a man without a past. Who was I now

– woman or man? That question could never be answered as
long as those were the only choices; it could never be
answered if it had to be asked. (Feinberg cited in Raymond,
1996, p.220)

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Drag challenges the audience to accept gender diversity just as Butler

prompts feminists to discard the category of woman in order to include in
their theories ‘the array of embodied beings culturally positioned as women’
(Butler, 1990a, p.325). As Heyes (2003) argues, feminism needs to speak to
and be spoken by more subjects than just men and women; there are a
multitude of other identities such as bisexual, lesbian, gay, transsexual,
transgender which all need to be engaged in political liberation. It is argued
by Taylor and Rupp (2005) that drag can play a role in transgressing the
punitively policed gender binary. They conducted focus groups with
audience members at drag acts and asked them what they had taken away
from the show. Many people felt that the labels ‘gay’, ‘straight’, ‘female’,
‘male’ didn’t fit drag queens; there was a recognition of a transgression of
these traditional distinctions. One audience member commented: ‘the drag
queens opened my eyes and my heart to the myriad of people that fill this
earth’ (Taylor and Rupp, 2005, p.2136). Drag clearly plays a part in building
the number of visible subjects which do not fit into established male/female
distinctions and, therefore, its performances provide a transgressive strategy
towards allowing for a greater variety of positions to be articulated.
We cannot, however, take all gender expressions as equal. As hooks
(1992, p.147) argues, the fact that white upper-class femininity is privileged
in Paris is Burning undermines the transgressive quality of the performance.
There is a need to retain critical awareness of material actualities when
exploring the way gender is expressed through drag, in order to analyse
whether the new narratives accumulated are transgressive or whether they
simply perpetuate gendered and raced oppression. As Heyes argues, it is
unhelpful to have a laissez-faire account of gender, as this ignores the fact
that some gender expressions hold stigmatized conceptions of women in
place (2003, p.1096). There is a need to be more discerning about different
types of drag when analysing it as a transgressive strategy. The humour
expressed in many mainstream drag acts (Dame Edna Everage, RuPaul, Lily

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Savage) is conservative and presents an image of women which is

stereotypical to the point of insult. The light entertainer Lily Savage’s act
includes lines such as ‘I’m sick of fellas. Think I’ll become a lesbian. At
least you get to wear flat shoes’ (Geocities, 2006). Savage’s act does not
create space for progressive narratives, but is in fact conforming entirely to
chauvinist and elitist representations of a working-class woman. Savage’s
presentation emphasizes selective feminine identities (big hair, short skirt,
loud mouth) and hence his mocking replication reinforces classed and
gendered stereotypes of women. Savage is not asking anyone to question the
labels they apply to people or their conceptions of real and unreal genders,
s/he is simply asking them to laugh at the idea of a man in ridiculous female
clothing; in short, Savage is a clown, not a pioneer.
Drag has the capacity to illustrate how limiting discussion of gender
to the binaries male and female is oppressive, but these same gender binaries
can be perpetuated and confirmed by drag. Here again, we have come to an
acceptance of the ambiguities raised by drag, but also a recognition that
those ambiguities are qualified by the inability to escape gender hierarchy,
even among drag queens.

The body as a battleground

The body has often presented as ‘prior to signification’ (Butler, 1990,
p.130), but drag illuminates the body and calls it ‘disputed territory’. The
body ceases to be a passive, natural surface upon which gender meaning is
inscribed and instead becomes a site for ‘denaturalized performance that
reveals the performative status of the natural itself’ (Butler, 1990, p.146).
Butler uses drag as evidence that the sexed body is not a natural entity, but
only becomes sexed as part of a discourse, or in Butler’s words, ‘through a
series of exclusions and denials’ (1990, p.135). Drag becomes political
through the body; it disorders the imposition of cultural coherence onto
bodies. That the body is a site of contention is made clear in the debate

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surrounding the physical body of drag queens described by Taylor and Rupp
(2005). A local drag queen had breast implants and subsequently spent most
of hir shows bare breasted. This provoked anger from some in the local drag
community who claimed s/he had ceased to be a gender-bender and had
become a ‘tittie queen’ and nothing but a ‘sex kitten’ to the audience (Taylor
and Rupp, 2005, p.2137). It was argued that the only way s/he could now
make a political statement was through the exposure of hir male genitalia.
Drag derives subversiveness from a mismatch between sex role and genital
sex: the disordering of bodily coherence. By having breast implants, the drag
queen was undermining the political statement made by drag: you do not
have to have the body of a woman to be gendered as a woman. Another drag
queen from the community commented ‘a drag queen is somebody who
knows he has a dick and two balls’ (Taylor and Rupp, 2005, p.2120).
So drag can be a transgressive strategy that works to make the female
body politically relevant and denaturalized, but in its eagerness to do so, we
might pose the question, does drag actually obscure the materiality of the
body and thus create new ways to oppress women’s bodies? Biddy Martin
remarks that Butler ‘fails to make the body enough of a drag on
signification’ (1994, p.110). By this, she means that the body is more
concrete and significant than Butler takes account of. Butler expects the
body to be infinitely flexible, but the body still has an incredible hold upon
sex role, even within drag culture. Newton (1979) talks of how important a
part of the drag queens’ costumes breasts are, the phrase ‘shows up’ often
being replaced by ‘tits up’ (1979, p.102). Senelick (2000) tells of how, in
drag performance, nakedness is about the removal of stigma and that the
body in this sense symbolizes natural basic humanity: ‘In drama, particularly
with a gay theme, the display of the penis is now the token of authenticity’
(Senelick 2000, p.495). Drag may not move us any further away from the
essentialization of the sexed body, as Butler wishes.

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Further, Martin worries that, by viewing the female body as plastic,

‘queer sexuality projected onto the female body becomes its own trap’ and,
as a consequence, ‘operations of misogyny disappear from view’ (1994,
p.109). To elaborate, Martin’s suggestion is that, as the female body
becomes a site of inscribed meaning and parody, the actualities of power
that act upon the feminine body to give it its form and significance may
become obscured. Bordo offers a similar argument in her article ‘Gay Men’s
Revenge’ (1999), through an analysis of commercial images of feminised
men. She claims that the aesthetics of masculinity are changing to become
more feminine; gay men are doing femme better than many women. Butler
might view this as a transgressive step, but Bordo takes a different
interpretation, arguing that these images are colonizing femininity and are
putting even greater pressure on both men and women to trim and preen
their bodies towards ‘perfection’. A striking analogy for these ideas is found
in Paris is Burning when you see a ball participant teaching a class full of
young New York women how to walk and conduct themselves like catwalk
models. Although the politicisation of the body through drag can be used as
a transgressive strategy, it is important that this process does not work to
obscure, or more worryingly perpetuate, the current impositions on women’s
bodies.

Disordering Compulsory Heterosexuality

An important function of drag, and the final one to be discussed here, is its
ability to ‘challenge compulsory heterosexuality and its central protagonists
“man” and “woman”‘ (Butler, 1990, p.136). Compulsory heterosexuality is
established within society through the opposition of masculine and
feminine; men are masculine, and so can only desire females, who are
necessarily feminine and thus any situation where desire does flow from
biological sex, and hence the ‘correct’ gender, is ruled out. Or, as Butler
puts it: ‘enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing

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gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the

regulation of sexuality’ (1990, p.136). The second wave feminist promotion
of a continuous line between sex and gender maintains this dual matrix and
thus ‘conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within
heterosexual, bisexual and gay and lesbian contexts’ (Butler, 1990a, p.337).
Sex is not binary, as Flax (1987) illustrated through her critique of the
traditional feminist emphasis on female sexuality as an expression of male
domination that leaves other forms of sexual experience inexplicable.
By confusing gender distinctions, drag undermines the assumption
that desire derives from gender and sex in such a restrictive manner. For
instance, Taylor and Rupp tell of how drag queens got people up on-stage
and asked them if they were ‘cocksuckers’ or ‘pussylickers’. In using terms
which usually refer to same-sex sexual acts, the drag queens ‘mobilized a
thinking of what those categories mean’ (Taylor and Rupp, 2005, p.2121),
uniting and dividing peoples’ sexuality in a way different from that allowed
under compulsory heterosexuality. Performers of drag challenge the
audience to categorize their sexuality; drag’s transgressive quality can be
seen in the audiences’ failure to do so. A statement from a drag king is
illuminating: ‘straight women are afraid of us, straight men don’t know
what to do with us and gay men are frustrated because they can’t have us’
(Senelick, 2000, p.494). The drag queens documented in Paris is Burning
transgressed sexual binaries in another important way. Through the
establishment of protective and sustaining ‘Houses’, they created new forms
of ‘community’ and facilitated a resignification of the family. This clears a
path for new relational norms and ways of organizing society that do not
follow binary fault-lines.
Raymond (1996) provides a critique of this interpretation of drag.
She argues that drag is not about transgressing sexual binaries, but is merely
a further conformity to sex roles; in short, drag is about turning other men
on. She points out that the number of transgendered people using hormones

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and having breast implants is rising and she attributes this to a desire to
appear attractive to men as ultra feminine women (Raymond, 1996, p.216).
Drag, then, ceases to be a transgressive strategy and becomes instead about
the appropriation of female sexuality. For some ball participants in Paris is
Burning, becoming physically more like a woman did seem to be aspired to
and this was linked-into becoming more sexually attractive to men. Hence,
drag distances itself from women, as its engagements are exclusively male.
However, Butler recognizes this criticism and replies to it by comparing the
argument to saying that butch lesbianism is just the displacement and
appropriation of men (Butler, 1993, p.127). She therefore exposes
Raymond’s critique as simply re-inscribing the heterosexual matrix. In
summary, drag can be an important transgressive strategy to disorder
compulsory heterosexuality within society, although we do have to be aware
of how far drag is creating new avenues of desire or simply generating new
forms of homosexual desire.

Conclusion
Drag can be performed so as to illuminate the ‘transferability of the
attribute’ woman and thus to liberate women from this oppressive category
(Butler, 2004, p.214). Just as easily, however, drag can be performed so as
to mock this category, amplifying and re-instating its defining features.
Through an initial argument that the subject is unstable, but that power
imbalances are still relevant when exploring identity, I have argued that drag
can contribute to the elevation of progressive gender expressions. However,
I recognize that not all gender expressions are equal. Therefore, the claim
that drag can politicize the body is bordered by awareness of the potentially
regressive impact of that process on the material female body. Similarly, an
understanding of the reflexive and recursive quality of drag indicates that
transgressive confusion of the binary system of sexuality may involve the
appropriation of feminine sexuality.

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Butler’s argument that drag is a transgressive strategy, as laid out in

Gender Trouble, therefore fails to be discerning enough about the form drag
should take and, more importantly, glosses over the fact that most drag takes
place within a hierarchically gendered context. As such, I find myself in
agreement with Bordo when she states that the male/female binary
distinction, though a social construction, still has profound consequences for
women’s experiences, concluding in opposition to Butler that: ‘In a culture
that is in fact constructed by gender duality…one cannot simply be human’
(1990, p.153). In subsequent works, Butler clarifies and qualifies her
position; she admits that ‘there is no necessary relation between drag and
subversion’ and that it can also be used in the service of ‘reidealisation’
(1993, p.125). She concludes, as do I, that ‘[a]t best…drag is a site of a
certain ambivalence’.
Although drag as a strategy is not sufficient to transcend gender
oppression, it is still a fascinating area of gender ambiguity and has
consequences for future strategies in the way that it exposes assumptions
and exclusions in feminist theory and demands contemporary feminists to be
more flexible and inclusive. Drag illuminates the fault lines of patriarchal
society by showing that there is nothing natural or essential about gender
expressions; if there were, these disloyal expressions would not exist.
However, by its reflective focus on certain presentations of gender, drag
shows the continued importance of cultural hierarchies. Employing this new
reading of the significance of drag to feminist discourse, one can re-interpret
the drag ball participants in Paris is Burning as simultaneously both
symbols of the instability of gender categories and victims of patriarchal
culture. Their performances show that the rules can be broken, but the
manner in which they are challenged proves their persistence. The
significance of drag is in its ability to expose gender hierarchies as artificial
and denatured, but it remains an uncomfortable strategy because it expresses
persistent cultural myths about the representability of women. However, to

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simply dismiss drag as regressive is to shoot the messenger and ignore the
cultural hierarchies that make drag so problematic.

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Bordo, S., 1990. ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-Scepticism’, in L.
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Bordo, S., 1999. ‘Gay Men’s Revenge’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
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