Gender, Culture, and Identity

This article explores the drag performance as a representation of a political and social critique of gender norms. It discusses how drag functions among LGBTQ communities and in heteronormative popular culture. It also examines the historical framework and motivations behind drag performances. The article delves into the concepts of masculinity and femininity, and how drag challenges the accepted connection between sex and sexual orientation. It further explores the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and embodiment in drag performances. The article concludes by discussing the performative nature of gender and the performance of femininity.

Student’s Last Name 1
Gender, Culture, and Identity
By (Name)
Course
Professor
University
Date

Student’s Last Name 2
Introduction
The drag performance, - the parody of gender via cross-dressing and adoption of
mannerism- has been in existence and still continues to be part of the United States LGBTQ
communities. The performance is a representation of a political as well as social critique of
gender norms. Since heterosexual norms hugely dictate gender roles, the drag performance
subverts the socially-constructed links that exist between sex, gender, and sexuality which
personify heteronormatively. However, the LGBTQ community is normally involved during
drag performances. Drag functions among LGBTQ communities in gay cultural spaces, and also
to heteronormative women in U.S. popular culture. Exploring drag across various social
locations and cultural sites illuminate how it is reflective of social privileges and oppression.
Straight women and men often perform drag in ways that highlight their interactions with sex,
gender, and power. Additionally, drag often crosses over into heteronormative popular culture.
Beyond traversing various cultural spaces, it has also moved from the physical stage to cyber
platforms catalyzed by new, digital and internet technologies. Exploring the drag performance
provides further insight on cultural understandings of sex, gender, sexuality, and embodiment
that regulate social power and shape lived experiences.
A historical framework shows drag is temporally situated within cultural attitudes
regarding sex and gender. Most often, theories of drag are ahistorical and anachronistic as older
theories of drag are used to frame new drag performances in ways that may not consider the
performers’ temporal material realities. Despite that drag is performance art, it is also considered
political and during other times, it is merely viewed as entertainment. It can often reify
normative thinking, while in other deployments it transgresses those limits. The performer and
the location of the performance shapes the constitutions and effects of drag performance.

Student’s Last Name 3
Because of this, people should move beyond discussing performances that utilize drag in a
monolithic sense and conceptualize them as genres of drag. Motivations to do drag are directly
connected to personal experiences, material realities, and social positioning. When people
perform drag, they bring themselves to the performances because the medium of drag is the
body. It is a layered performance of transformation that moves between and among various
personas and egos. In relation to drag queens, the paper discusses what it means to perform
femininity.
Defining Drag
Drag challenges the accepted connection between sex and sexual orientation, where
gender is dependent upon sex. At the most essential dimension, it is the epitome and execution of
sex-related to cross-dressing and reception of idiosyncrasies. Briefly, drag results in appearance,
cross-gendered conduct, and mentality by rebelliousness with regularizing sexual orientation
jobs as dependent upon social contents administered by organic sex (Keener, 2015, pp.486).
Despite this shared basis, the effect, composition, and motivations of drag performance are far
from universal. Drag discourse needs to be updated as a result of changing technologies and
cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and power (Baker, Burton and Smith, 1994, n.d.). It
is important to note the existence of drag within entertainment performance. Performance art
scholar Michael Moore tracks the history of cross-dressing used on stage and screen, yet fails to
acknowledge the vast differences between drag, cross-dressing, and impersonation (Moore,
2013, pp.17). He suggests, “Drag, the wearing of clothes of the opposite sex, is as old as gender
itself.” Because it is socially-situated and adaptive to specific social climates, its value
transcends entertainment. Moore's understanding of drag is depoliticized and sanitized without
considering gender politics. In these instances, drag merely upholds dominant models of sex and

Student’s Last Name 4
gender constructions, as nothing is transcended or troubled and “uncomplicated” entertainment is
centered (Dicker and Piepmeier, 2016, n.d.). Additionally, the concept of gendered
impersonation implies that the drag performer is a kind of gender imposter, and thus, that
biological sex determines gender authenticity.
Masculinity and Femininity
Feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins addressed feminist understandings of masculinity
and femininity. She contends that “masculine” traits are merely those that are most valued in a
patriarchal society, including intelligence, aggression, leadership, rationality, and strength. As
interlocking systems, gender traits and embodiment are shaped enormously by race and class
(Van Anders, 2015, pp.1201). Because of this, gender and drag performance can only be read
through these social categories. Journalism scholar Robert Jensen argued that masculinity is best
defined as what it is not: “what a real man is not is a woman or gay.” Manliness and
womanliness become hard to characterize in light of the fact that they depend vigorously on
classist, sexist, heterosexist, and racist ablest systems of oppression, yet are passed off as
common qualities of maleness and femaleness (Nytimes.com, 2019). The required hierarchy of
patriarchy operates around masculinity, a system that should be rejected by feminists regardless
of their social positioning. In Female Masculinity (2018), queer scholar Judith Halberstam
defines the drag king as “a female, usually, who dresses up in recognizably male costume and
performs theatrically in that costume.” In The Drag King Book (1999), she contends that the drag
king is a “tribute to masculinity.” Moving beyond this system requires new versions of gender
that transcend the binary. Perhaps feminist and queer discourses would come to more
transgressive and useful understandings if people do not assume that female resisting femininity
is adopting masculinity, especially when masculinity is structured around domination (Bridges

Student’s Last Name 5
and Pascoe, 2014, pp.251). Instead of “female masculinity,” can people conceive and theorize
“female non-femininity” in order to move beyond both normative and non-normative dialectics
that comprise the gender binary? The question also elicits a need to explore hegemonic
femininity and non-dominant femininities to the same extent as masculinities.
Drag and Culture
Drag is directly contingent on gender. As such, issues of sex, race, class, ability, and
embodiment as faced specifically by women in a patriarchal culture complicates the drag
practices and theories. Although gay male drag queens experience social oppression as a result of
heterosexism, women, gay and straight, experience drag quite differently in practice and theory.
Female drag performers face specific sets of issues by performing masculinities within a sexist
and heterosexist culture (Bilbrey, 2015, pp.382). Scholarship that examines female drag
generally focuses on heteronormative women. The other main track focuses on female drag as
performed by lesbian or queer-identified women in gay and lesbian cultural spaces. The
implications of the differences between the two are rarely acknowledged or analyzed.
Sexual Orientation as Performance
The body, which is a subject of character has a high possibility of its social condition. As
Butler (1990) puts it, “The body appears as a passive medium on which cultural meanings are
inscribed or as the instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determine a
cultural meaning for itself” (p.8). The body is viewed as a medium used to inscribe meanings as
a result of cultural influence. Particularly, performance is a term which is used to describe the
means which people act in the real world as well as how the bodies situate themselves. Based on
Butler’s theory of performativity, it articulates that society has got a direct and indirect influence

Student’s Last Name 6
on the performance, including the body itself. Gender performativity in itself does not refer to
what a person is but rather what a person does, an act, or more specifically, a sequence of acts
(Stryker and Bettcher, 2016, pp.9). Butler’s theory goes ahead and argues that gender can be
defined as replicated acts that fall within a singularly rigid regulatory frame. As such, Butler
gives a suggestion that there exist constraints as well as restrictions relating to how gender is
established and understood in society.
Aside from viewing sexual orientation as a performative act that is as a result of cultural
influence, gender can as well be defined in terms of political, social, along with political
intersections of identity (Weber, 2016, pp.33). Butler’s theory goes ahead to instigate that not all
the time is gender is coherently or consistently coherent in distinct historical contexts. However,
gender is an interaction between class, sexual, racial, ethnic, as well as regional modalities of
diffusely initiated modalities (Berger, Wallis and Watson, 2012, n.d.). Thus, it becomes difficult
to isolate “gender” from the cultural in addition to the political intersections that invariably
produces and maintains it. In an attempt to create emphasizes on gender complexity, including
performance as well as their mutual constitution, the queer theory has been integrated into sexual
orientation and performance scholarship.
The theory is often used in deconstructing LGBTQ identify theories along with the queer
text. The queer refers to the mismatch that exists between desire, sex, and gender (Volcano and
Halberstam, 1999, n.d.). Regardless that the queer theory is commonly used in deconstructing
homosexuality and same-sex desire, the queer theory is also extensively used in exploring the
identities that exist beyond a person being regarded as a gay or a lesbian (Drushel, 2013, pp.47).
The queer theory is multi-faceted and along these lines without an unequivocal and strong
definition. Nonetheless, the theory centers around deconstructing the sexual way of life just as

Student’s Last Name 7
the regularizing gendered orders. Butler’s theory is in support of this theory stating that gender
should not only be considered as a cultural inscription defining particular sex. Rather, gender
should also delegate the specific apparatus of production that is used to establish sex.
Sex and Sexual Variance
As a performative operator, the body is not free of sexual orientation’s social implications
and sex exhibitions continue to be subjective in the way which they work. Particularly, the body
might work within gender’s cultural constraints, inevitably choosing to receive the social
developments of being either a male or a female. For example, in the meantime, the body may
accept the social developments of femaleness or maleness, changing from one development to
the next, or by straying far from the furthest points of the meaning of what it involves being a
female or a male (Edgar, 2011, pp.141). The idea that the body works within gender’s cultural
constructions offer suggestions that the body is capable of performing gender and sexual
variance. According to Butler’s theory, it is crucial that the performer as performance should
understand the fluidity of gender. Butler (1990) is of the opinion that gender should not be
viewed as a passive medium that is used to incorporate scripts but rather, Butler states, “Gender
is what is put on…daily and incessantly…but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or
linguistic given, power or is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive
performances of various kinds” (p.531). On the off chance that the body is to remain
performatively rebellious, at that point, the performer is entitled to actively perceive their body
as a performative agent. Such an idea is observed through the different means through which the
Ballroom community drifts from sex’s preconceived notions.

Student’s Last Name 8
In addition, the Ballroom culture as well as depicts gender’s variant nature along with
expanding beliefs of what is conventionally defined as maleness or femaleness’ performance.
According to Bailey (2013), ballroom members develop an extensive range of sexual as well as
gender subjectivities than what is legitimized and recognized in the world of heteronormative.
Bailey further states that such specific categories go beyond the gay, bisexual, straight divisions
and the male and female binary. According to him, he notes that the Ballroom members to some
extent do not consider atomic sex as a pointer of how every member plays out their long-lasting
sexual orientation personality (Strings and Bui, 2014, pp.827). Essentially, sex classifications are
incomplete and the Ballroom members elaborate this by recognizing that the body’s sex results
from an ongoing process and not a biological fact. Recognizing the different genders related to
sex furthermore raises more concerns and discourse surrounding the necessity of deconstructing
several genders, including gender’s performance. The individual control sets apart the making of
a particular gender identity (Jenkins, 2013, n.d.). Such a procedure is an individual control's
viewpoint just as a political demonstration that opposes societal desires for sexual orientation.
All things considered, the demonstrations of sexual orientation execution can be utilized to
oppose the desires that the general public has relating to sex.
Performance of Femininity
Creating an understanding pertaining how sexual variance including gender is present in
the social and the cultural constructions of gender and sex makes it possible to understand how
the lived experience of the bodies affect the way which bodies perform their gender. Particularly,
regarding performance femininity, research has deconstructed womanhood as femaleness’
biological indicator. Anders (2015) is of the belief that orientation theories that are rooted in sex
binaries are complex because they fail to address gaps such as real individuals lived experience.

Student’s Last Name 9
As such, the way these theories define men and women is incoherent, and they fail to
acknowledge that what counts as sex is contingent. Thus, most of the scholars, in their definition
of a man and woman, have attempted to go beyond considering sex as an indicator of gender and
gender differences. Particularly, womanhood is as a result of cultural and social experience.
A contention by Garber insists that gender is not connected to a biological substratum.
Rather, boundaries associated with gender can be breached. Nonetheless, individual as well as
social organized transition from specific sex to another point out the social, social alongside
stylish discords. In spite of that sexual orientation developments alongside womanhood have
been deconstructed as either social or social experience that subject and unexpected to change, in
accordance with individuals, there exists no vital womanhood or masculinity, womanliness or
manliness, femaleness or maleness (Egner and Maloney, 2016, pp.891). Be that as it may, when
sexual orientation has been attributed, the social request develops and it holds individuals to
indestructible gendered convictions and desires. Societal convictions, chains of importance,
including values dictate the meanings of womanhood and gentility.
Regardless that there is little research regarding the definition of femininity, researchers
are beginning to explore defining the term based on gender’s hegemonic ideas, erasing
performative experiences of people who are unlikely to pass the test of becoming a woman in the
modern culture. According to Halberstam (2018), exploring gender presentation in both the
males and female bathrooms, draws experience from one of the characters and a “butch” woman
known as Jess Goldberg featured in Stone Butch Blues. In the study, Halberstam elaborates on
Jess’s experience, a period when she tried to make use of a public bathroom. In that particular
bathroom, there were two women present (Paris, 1993, pp.984). Ultimately, the two rejected
Jess’s presence in the bathroom, making jokes to call security and by questioning her

Student’s Last Name 10
womanhood. Halberstam states, “Her body imposes a limit on her attempts to function normally
despite her variant gender presentation. Their casualness about calling security indicates that
they know Jess is a woman but want to punish her for her inappropriate self-presentation” (p.22-
23). Halberstam’s story is a suggestion that despite femininity appearing to be as a result of
whiteness as well as masculinity’s hegemonic ideas, researchers are beginning to explore the
manner which femininity, as well as womanhood, are questioned on the basis of performance
and gender presentation.
Drag Queen Performance
Research carried out by Halberstam and Butler among other researchers delve into the
means through eccentric people acquire command over their bodies utilizing drag execution.
Drag performance is used to make reference to people who perform over-exaggerated gender
representations for an audience. Horowitz (2013) was involved in a nine-month participant-
observation in one of the gay bars that are primarily patronized by gay men identified themselves
as drag queens. In her study, Horowitz argues that gender performance, especially as per the drag
culture, communicates a parallel clash that pits and partitions the "genuine" execution of
character to the "fake" execution of personality. Hobson (2013) goes ahead and demonstrates
that drag performance is simply, however, one of the sites where the elements of sexuality, race,
gender, and class are observed to come out as being both oppressive and resistant. Nonetheless,
Butler (2011) is of the opinion that drag performance can be applied in subverting gender’s
socially constructed performance. While drag performance can be applied in subverting gender’s
socially constructed performance, researchers such as LeMaster (2015) proposes that television
shows are related to drag queen competition, for instance, the Drag U, are drag queens who

Student’s Last Name 11
normally perform womanhood’s normative characteristics with the intention of pleasing the
audience, thus abiding by the gender binary.
Basically, the drag queen performance develops tension between drag as an act that
subverts gender’s heterosexual traditions and drags as an act which fortifies the gender binary.
As a demonstration of disruption, drag provides a supposition that it is against the beliefs related
to sex and sexuality which are forced onto the performative bodies (Enke, 2012, n.d.).
Nonetheless, considering that drag is a performance that strengthens the gender binary, it
assumes that drag performance’s aspects likely mirrors, normative assumptions that are linked to
gender. Seeing drag performance as a performance which strengthens the gender binary proposes
that drag strengthens the belief that whether a person is a male or a female is based and
determined on strict classifications of gender and sex.
Conclusion
Discourses in regards to sexual orientation personality and its demeanor have been
currently examined, and with regards to exhibitions of sex, their noticeable quality is something
that can be seen on the predominance of drag queens in the media. The performance is a
representation of a political as well as social critique of gender norms. Since heterosexual norms
hugely dictate gender roles, the drag performance subverts the socially-constructed links that
exist between sex, gender, and sexuality which personify heteronormatively. Theories of drag are
ahistorical and anachronistic as older theories of drag are used to frame new drag performances
in ways that may not consider the performers’ temporal material realities. Gender and drag
performance can only be read through these social categories. Aside from viewing sexual

Student’s Last Name 12
orientation as a performative act that is as a result of cultural influence, gender can as well be
defined in terms of political, social, along with political intersections of identity.

Student’s Last Name 13
Bibliography
Bailey, M.M., 2013. Butch queens up in pumps: Gender, performance, and ballroom culture in
Detroit. University of Michigan Press.
Baker, R., Burton, P. and Smith, R., 1994. Drag: A history of female impersonation in the
performing arts. NYU Press.
Berger, M., Wallis, B. and Watson, S., 2012. Constructing masculinity. Routledge.
Bilbrey, M.L., 2015. Transgender identity and media in historical perspective. Honors Theses.
Paper, 382.
Bridges, T. and Pascoe, C.J., 2014. Hybrid masculinities: New directions in the sociology of men
and masculinities. Sociology Compass, 8(3), pp.246-258.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York:
Routledge.
Butler, J., 2011. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. Routledge.
Dicker, R. and Piepmeier, A. eds., 2016. Catching a wave: Reclaiming feminism for the 21st
century. Northeastern University Press.
Drushel, B., 2013. Performing Race, Class, and Gender: The Tangled History of
Drag. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 13(2), pp.1-55.
Edgar, E.A., 2011. Xtravaganza!” drag representation and articulation in" RuPaul's Drag
Race. Studies in Popular Culture, 34(1), pp.133-146.

Student’s Last Name 14
Egner, J. and Maloney, P., 2016. “It Has No Color, It Has No Gender, It’s Gender Bending”:
Gender and Sexuality Fluidity and Subversiveness in Drag Performance. Journal of
homosexuality, 63(7), pp.875-903.
Enke, F. ed., 2012. Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond transgender and gender studies.
Temple University Press.
Halberstam, J., 2018. Female masculinity. Duke University Press.
Hobson, K. (2013). Performative tensions in female drag performances. Kaleidoscope: A 97
Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research, 12, 35-51.
Horowitz, K.R., 2013. The trouble with “queerness”: Drag and the making of two
cultures. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(2), pp.303-326.
Jenkins, S.T., 2013. Hegemonic" realness"? An intersectional feminist analysis of" RuPaul's
Drag Race". Florida Atlantic University.
Keener, E., 2015. The complexity of gender: It is all that and more…. In sum, it is
complicated. Sex Roles, 73(11-12), pp.481-489.
LeMaster, B., 2015. Discontents of being and becoming fabulous on RuPaul's drag u: Queer
criticism in neoliberal times. Women's Studies in Communication, 38(2), pp.167-186.
Moore, R., 2013. Everything else is drag: Linguistic drag and gender parody on RuPaul’s Drag
Race. Journal of Research in Gender Studies, 3(2), pp.15-26.

Student’s Last Name 15
Nytimes.com. (2019). Opinion | What Makes a Woman? [online] Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html?_r=0
[Accessed 25 Apr. 2019].
Paris, S., 1993. “inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories" edited by Diana Fuss (Book
Review). Signs, 18(4), p.984.
Strings, S. and Bui, L.T., 2014. “She Is Not Acting, She Is” The conflict between gender and
racial realness on RuPaul's Drag Race. Feminist Media Studies, 14(5), pp.822-836.
Stryker, S. and Bettcher, T.M., 2016. IntroductionTrans/Feminisms. TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, 3(1-2), pp.5-14.
Van Anders, S.M., 2015. Beyond sexual orientation: Integrating gender/sex and diverse
sexualities via sexual configurations theory. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44(5), pp.1177-1213.
Volcano, D.L. and Halberstam, J., 1999. The drag king book. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Weber, S., 2016. “Womanhood does not reside in documentation”: Queer and feminist student
activism for transgender women's inclusion at women's colleges. Journal of lesbian
studies, 20(1), pp.29-45.