I Heart Drag Queens

It’s true, I do.  I got upset that I had to work the day that St. Rose had the drag show.  I didn’t go to it last year; I had gone home for the day and when I came back, Jenna was outside my room.  She rushed over to me excitedly and gushed, “You have to meet my new boyfriend, Donny!” She pulled me by the hand and just as I was wondering how she could have found a boyfriend in the span of a few hours, she opened the door and there sat Donny.  Pretty cute, I thought.  “Hey, I’m Kellie.”  Donny and Jenna started cracking up.  Turns out Donny was Danielle dressed in drag–she had performed earlier in the show.  They’re still not letting me live it down. So I suppose I should amend the title of my blog to declare my love for drag kings too.  Kings?  That the right word?  Kinda funny that I don’t think twice about “drag queen” but I’m uneasy with what to call women who dress in drag.  Ironic that even when gender boundaries and definitions are skewed, the (biological) women are still shorthanded.  

Sorry.  I really am a feminist at heart.  I’m happy to be discussing another feminist/woman theorist, even if she does confuse the shit out of me at times.  I feel as though Butler should have made a clearer distinction between sex and gender.  Oh, and between “anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” (2498).  As I’ve always understood it, sex and gender go like this: sex is the biological difference between men and women, and gender is the social/cultural expectation and role linked to these biological differences.  (Indiana.edu can back me up).  So what’s the difference between gender identity and gender performance?  Bulter seems to define the performance aspect in terms of drag–but I see drag as gender identity.  To me, gender performance is more of an act, a show put on for the rest of society.  Not the gender you really are, but the one you’re “supposed” to be.  A simple example: someone who isn’t out of the closet yet decides to “play the part” of a heterosexual male or female in order to acquiesce to the gender norm.  Gender identity, to provide another simple example, is when a woman who associates with the male gender dresses as a man.  But wait–the gender norm, Butler says, doesn’t actually exist.  It’s a fabrication, a “fantasy of a fantasy.”  “Because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender,” she says, “create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (2500).  I understand it, but it reminds me of an M.C. Escher work.  It all depends on a dependent variable, it all goes in a circle, it’s physically impossible.  This is similar to the question I’d asked the other day about Foucault: If the monogamous, married, heterosexual couple is fast becoming the minority, then why is it still held as the norm for sexual relations?  Why is homosexuality so despised and scorned still?  There’s no actual gender norm, just like there’s no sexuality norm.  Then why do we still hold them to be the standards by which we act in society?  Another M. C. Escher question, I guess.