All the Rest is Drag

 Drag Queens, Gay Culture, Camp and Pageantry

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Restorative History: The history that is left out of our official accounts. It is not extra history, but the history just like any other.

• Often stories are unknown even to those that live in a place (like NYC or Atlantic City) unless you are part of the marginalized community which was witness to these events.
• teaches marginalized people their own history and how they are part of the history of a place
• The loss of storytellers -- this is an issue for many communities
• last speaker of a language
• lost traditions in colonial contexts
• lost traditions with displacement and gentrification
• stigmatized groups are seen as without significant culture and history
• We think of restorative history as SPECIAL history (often reserved for a special month) but it is not. It IS HISTORY.

New York City Drag in the 1950s-1970s- How does it compare to what you are reading about in Atlantic City?

Indiana to South Carolina Avenues --- The Streets that were forgotten.

• Hubs of African American and Gay life in Atlantic City
• Frequented by tourists who were brave enough to stray away from the boardwalk and experience the shadow subcultures which frequented the bars and clubs on the side streets
• These areas were the lifeblood of the communities. People worked and lived and partied on these streets which were "forgotten" and allowed to develop as authentic expressions of the respective cultures. 
• The were not "midways" (Bryant Simon)-- fly by night attractions created to take advantage of the tourists who frequented the legitimate attractions on the Boardwalk. 

Back Workers, Tourism, and Organized Crime (Embodying Spaces)

• race, class, gender and privilege -- the dark side of tourist economies 
• what Simon calls a "tale of two cities" ---The Boardwalk and the "funky midway of nightclubs, street corner and backrooms"
• Organized crime and the business of gay bars (marked bodies and the underground economy)
• "Back Spaces" and the life of stigmatized communities
• Areas were safe places to be yourself, socialized and express ones shared values, beliefs and practices
• Only places that these community members could go
• Open to tourists and others from the privileged communities.
• Tourism as consumer culture

Drag as Embodied Homosexuality

• How id drag is the embodiment of gayness (unapologetic)?
• No attempt to cover
• Alternate expression of gender with the body as the vehicle for this expression
• the body as the vehicle for this subversion and protest
• Pageantry and embodied performance

• The Miss’d America Pageant was created as a way to revitalize the gay community in Atlantic City in the wake of the damage wrought by AIDS and this stigmatization. 

• When creating a ritual to counter these threats, the gay community looked to the traditional functions of drag performance through the language of camp and to their local experience of pageantry, Miss America.

• The performance of gender in traditional beauty pageants is deeply contextualized in cultural meaning about the body and how it is used.

• Beauty contests are not simply about femininity or female beauty or even competition, but about the negotiation and enactment of cultural values.

• pageantry allows for the expression of norms, as well as alternatives to these conventions, in a context that appears inconsequential

• Other displays of embodied gender

• The Circassian Beauty was a representation of the Victorian cult of “true womanhood.

Miss America and Modern Pageantry

• Displays of female bodies
• bathing beauties
• features of ideal femininity imprinted on bodies: chastity, good tempered, physical beauty
• debates about the "exposure" of women's bodies in displays
• policing
• race (Rule #7)
• sexual behavior
• gender comportment
• marital status/motherhood
• sexual orientation

Ironing Competition 1955

Ideal Feminine Bodies

Table Setting Competition

• Resistance to "objectification" of women's bodies
• Violation of Obscenity laws -1930s
• Violation of Behaviors for unmarried girls 1950s
• 1968 protests-Began the modern feminist movement (in Atlantic City)
• Collaboration
• Social and political issues are acknowledged and "resolved" in the context of the pageant
• femininity is not offensive
• no opinions that offend
• interview questions -- “no contestant wants to alienate any viewers; . . . the answers must satisfy everyone.”
• camaraderie of girls (supposed)
• positivity
• physical beauty/non-sexually active sexuality

• Reflected constantly changing and always complicated stories about nation itself: 

• who counts as part of the nation? 
• What does it mean to be a specifically feminine representative of the nation? 
• How are social concerns—such as racism, multiculturalism, and ‘family values’—mediated in and through women’s bodies on the public stage? 
• what are the social and cultural conditions through which particular kinds of representation can occur?”

• Moral principles are also contested in pageantry; concepts of appropriate behavior for women

  are presented to define ideal womanhood.

• between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five

• Meet the requirements for competing in a certain city or state

• be in reasonably good health to meet the job requirements

• meet character criteria as set forth by the Miss America Organization

• be a United States citizen; meet residency requirements for competing in a certain city or state

• time commitment and job responsibilities as set forth by the local, state, and national competition(s) in which one competes

These regulations are expressions of power that consider gender identity, marital status, sexual and social behavior, and even the form and comportment of contestants’ bodies—their mannerisms, and potentially disqualifying disabilities.

(Section 2.6.1)—You must be female; 

(Section 2.6.2)—You cannot be married, previously married, or divorced; 

(Section 2.6.3)—You must not have a child—be currently or previously pregnant, or be the adoptive

parent of any child

(Section 2.6.5)—You must not have been charged for any minor offenses in the last 24 months; you cannot compete if you have ever been convicted of a “criminal offense”

(Section 2.7.5)—You cannot get engaged during your year of service without written permission from the Miss America Organization; [and among other legal obligations] 

(Section 6.7)—If any statements you make in the contract are untrue, if something changes your eligibility, if you have inappropriate mannerisms, do not follow the rules, or suffer a disability that keeps you from fulfilling duties, the MAO can take your title from you

Rules from the "hostess Committee" to ensure the avoidance of scandal and the alignment with gendered bodily comportment:

• She may not answer a telephone—the hostess answers that, and if the party on the other end is a newspaper or television reporter, she hangs up.

• No man—and this includes her father, who presumably knows her quite well and has no ulterior motives—may enter the [bed]room.

• She may speak to no man without a hostess present, and this includes all male relatives.

• She may not walk on the beach or boardwalk with any man or go shopping or sightseeing with one or relax with one poolside.

• She must occupy a private room with no connecting door, since such things are conducive to sin.

• She may not leave her room, even to mail a letter, unless the hostess is with her.

• All places serving liquor are off limits, and she is in deep trouble if she sneaks a snort in the privacy of her own room.

• Smoking is forbidden.

• She may accept no gifts of any sort.

• She may kiss no man.

• All interviews with reporters and photographs must be authorized by the pageant

Contestants are disciplined in a way that ensures that ideal femininity will be preserved and protected from the various corrupting forces that threaten it. This discipline extends to every aspect of contestants’ lives, both public and private, and encompasses the shape (good health/fitness), comportment (behaviors and mannerisms), and sexual behavior (never pregnant, single) of women’s bodies. Evidence of violations of these ideal womanly virtues even outside the confines of pageantry are enough to disqualify contestants.

1. Vanessa Williams 1984

Drag Pageantry and Miss America

• all evolved in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots in gay bars
• modeled after the Miss America format (most highly influential for pageants worldwide)

• Unlike cross-dressing or the gendered presentation of transgendered individuals, drag is a public performance that requires an audience aware of the fact that drag queens are not women, but men (or that drag kings are women). No matter how real the presentation of femininity by drag queens, the contradiction, based primarily on anatomy or behavior (in a body), is apparent to the audience, and the tension created through this contradiction affords drag its potential expressive power. The “collusion between the audience and the performer” highlights the important role of the audience in maintaining the disruption between sex and gender in drag

• Drag as embodied "masculinity"

• Drag queens use their feminine persona as a means for enacting masculinity, where femininity becomes “merely the real estate upon which” drag queens might obtain and exert status and power.21 Drag can be, therefore, a way of successfully expressing masculinity, one available to homosexual men, who otherwise may lack access to heterosexual male power. (apart from the gay male physical ideal)

• The association of drag with masculinity is also based largely on the fact that modern drag performance originated in and continues to evolve in gay male bars, and as such remains a central part of gay male culture and nightlife.

• Rather than losing power, as one might presume, by identifying as female, drag queens gain power through successful performance, and in this sense construct their symbolic masculinity. The potential for achieving status within their communities is the reason given by many for becoming drag queens.

• Enacting femininity allows drag queens to access power not readily available to cis-women or homosexual men in American culture. 

• What they are asserting instead is an alternative masculinity, one without the restrictions usually associated with expressions of (heteronormative) masculinity—restrictions that are more about what thou shalt not do (femininity) than about what thou shalt do.

• Drag queens are not only queens, they are also divas.

• Female contestants in traditional beauty pageants may also attempt to exert power, but their expressions tend to be covert, instead signifying valued, conventional female qualities like cooperation, humility, and grace.

• Drag queens, on the other hand, may openly and unapologetically assert their power over each other and the audience in their role as divas, revealing the maintenance of their underlying masculinity.

• the body is the battleground for contesting the categories of gender, sex, and sexuality. It is expected that one accurately displays this essential information clearly in one’s dress, hygiene, speech, and comportment. Failing to do so is considered criminal in a culture that is highly disciplined. Violence against gay men and the murder of trans women are stark reminders of this

• Significant violations of body presentation are subject to social stigmatization, but violations of gender, sex, or sexuality are grounds for physical violence and retribution when enacted outside of the context of performance. 

• In the ritual context of a drag show, the everyday meaning associated with presenting a gender that is false is suspended. A man pretending to be a woman is given dispensation where there exists a safety zone between audience and performer, and where the audience is complicit in the ruse.
• Removing this liminal space calls the meaning of the false presentation into question; it is no longer primarily a performance but a transgression against social mores. Drag queens, therefore, are as likely to be revered on stage as they are to be beaten up in an alley, further emphasizing the contextual nature of their status and power.

• Categories of sex, gender, and sexuality are often conflated by outsiders, while contested by drag queens themselves. 

• What you see represented in one’s body may or may not be a representation of their sex, gender, or sexuality. Some drag queens do not identify as gay. 

• Gender, therefore, is not outside the way a woman (or a man) dresses, acts, and speaks, but is instead constituted by these and other practices “because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the ideal of gender, and without these acts, there would be no gender at all.” 

• Many drag queens interviewed for this research question this strict reading of performativity. While recognizing that gender is performed, they also claim that essentialism is at the heart of their performance.

• Farrah Mascara: “The way that I act on stage or present myself on stage, when I get dressed, put on things, it just takes over instinctively. The costume draws something out of me, which is already there. It is natural. My male persona is more of a performance. . . I have had to practice being a man, lower my voice on the phone, for example, shake the hand a little firmer, masculine up. Probably my day to day life is more than a performance . . Farrah is easy.”

Intersectionality and Performance in the Body

• Drag is not simply a reflection of gender roles in society; it expresses aspects of race, class, and sexuality that are intrinsically linked to expressions of gender. Drag, therefore, must be understood as a performance of race, class, and sexuality as well as gender: codes of gender performance being

  constructed through these other axes.

• Camp: “ ‘Mother Camp’ ” as an honorific implies something about the relationship of the female impersonator to his gay audience . . . ‘camp,’ the latter word then referring to the whole system of humor. This reflects my belief that camp humor ultimately grows out of the incongruities and absurdities of the patriarchal nuclear family; for example, the incongruity between the sacred, idealized Mother, and the profane, obscene Woman. If camp humor takes such problems as its special subject, then the drag queen is its natural exponent.

• Drag then, within the gay community, is inherently political. It is a critique of masculinity and the nuclear family structure based on this masculine privilege, using the contested female body as the battleground. The female body is defined by its presentation, whether real or satirical, rather than

  any actuality of the body. In fact, it is performed in direct opposition to the real, lived body.

Queering and the Body

• The yelling of “Show us your shoes!” is an example of the communicative style of reading.

• According to drag language ideology, the drag queens read the Miss America contestants both to express their camaraderie with and affection for them, and to make sure that they didn’t “take themselves too seriously.”
• Questioning about body comportment and femininity
• To some, the parade is just fun; to others it pokes fun at the absurd images of ideal femininity and the normative restriction placed on women and their bodies. Once again, “camp is in the eye of the beholder.”
• Bodies in queer spaces
• Miss America Pageant contestants were not permitted to go to the bars on NY avenue or the Miss'd America Pageant (until Kate Shindle -AIDS- violated this rule).
• Queer staff from Miss America hung out on NY Ave. 

• The drag subculture in Atlantic City admires the Miss America Pageant in part because of their interpretation of its pageantry as an exaggerated performance of femininity, as an act of creativity, or, simply put, as precisely what they themselves do—camp. 

• They empathize with Miss America contestants; pageant performances are interpreted as staged executions of femininity at its finest.

• They aim, as do drag queens, to let the audience see “who they are,” although for drag queens, who they are is decidedly and deliberately different from their boy selves. 

• If beauty pageant contestants are objectified, according to drag queens, it is because they do not have control over their performance, over their interpretation of femininity. Their lack of agency is judged by drag queens to be evidenced in the uniform shapes, styles, and presentations of the women’s bodies and the utilitarian, uniform nature of their clothing.

• Pageant girls are not to blame for the failure of beauty pageants and their tawdry reputation. It is instead the heteronormative world that objectifies women and stigmatizes gay men. 

• This reality allows gay men to empathize with beauty pageant contestants despite their very different worlds. For drag queens, this empathy is even more pronounced, for they have the opportunity to experience what it is like to be a woman, to be the object of the male gaze, to be stigmatized and subject to violence, even by those in the gay community.

 The Feminine Body as Object and Subject

• In both beauty and drag pageants, women’s bodies are presented and marked with important social and cultural meaning. This meaning is an expression of the core values of the community in which they are situated.

• Brains and beauty, not brains alone, mark the ideal woman. She is the product of an addition of intelligence, not of the loss of her value as an object of sexual arousal. She is still the chaste girl next door, but in heels and a bikini of her own choice.

• Object: The Swimsuit Competition
• “the swimsuit competition is an even that is about physical and moral disciplining of women’s bodies. . . . It requires contestants to wear swimsuits that are designed to never come in contact with water and are strictly regulated in terms of how many inches of skin may be exposed . . . and it is precisely this disciplining that makes the swimsuit competition an absolutely necessary element of the Miss America Pageant; because it is the performance of the female object, a performance that is then juxtaposed to the interview and talent competitions, which are the performances of the female subject.”

• the New York Radical Women, a second-wave radical feminist organization, waged the now infamous protest and bra burning against the Miss America Pageant on September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City. The group had as its stated mission a “dismantling of the patriarchy...” and to highlight the ways women are enslaved by beauty standards.

• Though always controversial, in 2014, the swimsuit portion of the Miss America pageant was renamed the “physical fitness” portion, and many local feeder pageants no longer required contestants to wear high heels during their parade in front of the panel of judges. But, of course, these moves served only to highlight the contradiction apparent in wearing a swimsuit in a competition for scholarships.

• Bathing suit is where drag queens do all their magic...least coverage and needs all the illusion to work. Not about practicality.

• Object: Evening Gown Competition

• The evening gown competition is a display of feminine comportment. It is meant to symbolize through the formal presentation of the body the training in etiquette that a debutante might display after finishing school. Where else would one wear an evening gown? As such, it is an overt display of class consciousness.

• The fact that Miss Missouri (Erin O'Flagherty) was already marked as gay may have subjected her to deeper scrutiny by the audience, the Miss America Organization, and the judges, all focusing on her comportment as an embodied lesbian contestant. This may explain why during the Show Me Your Shoes Parade she was rather demure when passing the screaming, bawdy crowds on New York Avenue— this compared to other contestants who responded with high fives and shrieks, one even grabbing a rainbow flag and waving it in the air.

• Drag: glamour and Camp. Over the top presentations

• Subject: Talent Competition

• As Lauren Cox writes in Hollywood Life: “Unfortunately for the contestants of the 2017 Miss America pageant, their [demonstrated] talents were just not enough to excite their fellow people. As many of the contestants danced, sang, and twirled batons to impress the judges, the internet went wild with overwhelming boredom—especially when the only contestant holding an instrument was eliminated and not allowed to perform. . . . There were some really incredible performances during the talent portion, but many of them appeared to be very similar.”

• Miss'd America talent is all about uniqueness and individual expression

• Subject: The Interview

• The challenge is for the contestants to express these opinions in a way that also meets the assumed qualities of ideal femininity

• In the 2016 Miss America Pageant finals, when asked which women should be on the new ten-dollar bill, Miss Colorado, Kelley Johnson, responded that Ellen DeGeneres was her choice: “I think that woman is so amazing. Not only is she kind; not only is she intelligent; not only is her entire platform speaking of tolerance and equality for all and kindness, but she is able to be funny without insulting people.”  

• Miss Colorado’s answer sums up the qualities with which any Miss America should be identified: kindness, intelligence, tolerance, and tact. 
• She may have opinions, but not any that might offend someone.
• Miss America 2.0: reforms attempt to disavow the criticisms about beauty pageants and emphisize the scholarship aspect of the competition rather than beauty contest.
• took away all the pageantry and symbolic meaning
• boring to all who watch or participate.

• Impact of popularity of drag pageantry on pageantry: Perhaps the impact of the mainstreaming of drag and drag competitions is to forever change how we view such pageants and competitions. Increasingly, audiences understand that drag pageants and drag shows are essentially valuable as theater, and read them as metaphor, not through the lens of realness.

Drag Kings/Drag Queens and the Body as Symbol

• Kings versus queens
• why is there an absence of drag kings in popular culture? What does this say about gender and the symbol of the body?
• Historically, drag kings have been female performance artists who wear masculine drag and personify male gender stereotypes. 
• But as understandings of gender have become more fluid in recent years, so too has this definition; now, there are trans men kings, nonbinary kings, and even cisgender men who perform as drag kings—just as there are cisgender women who perform as queens. 
• Politics and Gender expression and the body
• Rain Dove, a model and activist who also posed for Vogue, doesn’t consider what she does drag at all; on Instagram, where she has 215,000 followers and counting, she calls herself a “gender capitalist,” meaning she opts to code as a woman or a man depending on which will get her the most out of any given situation.
• When women assume male characteristics they deny the patriarchy what it sees as their traditional roles. For certain parts of society, that’s threatening.
• women’s underrepresentation in front of and behind the camera
• “Drag is therapy,” -gender expression and subversion
• “Drag is what sent me on the path to discovering my queerness. I don’t know if I would’ve found this aspect of myself otherwise.”(Gene Jeanie)
• Body as a canvas for expression
• When I open up my dresser, it’s like I’m opening up a toolbox. I see every garment as a tool and it helps me access the world around me. I think, What kind of day do I want to have? What kind of people am I likely to encounter today? How am I likely to get more out of them? Then, I put my outfit together like an architect. It’s almost like a blueprint for the experience I’m going to have that day. (Gene Jeanie)
• It’s multiple layers. You have to look at posture, vocals, mannerisms. I went down to North Carolina to fight HB2 [the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act], and I stood in front of the bathrooms in a dress and asked which one I should go into and everybody said, “Sir, just go into the men’s room, you’re fine.” (Clothing as code for gender)
• I identify with my body, but I don’t identify it as male or female, I just identify it as a vehicle to help me bring my awareness around the world. I see myself as an experience, and I have this awesome vessel. (Gene Jeanie)