Gender Performance and Drag
In my Feminist Thought & Theory class, we discussed Judith Butler's ideas on gender performance and gender as a construction of identity. One of the most interesting ideas that Butler brings up is drag as gender performance. Everyday, people perform gender through physical and behavioral cues that fit within society's "accepted" gender roles.
Drag plays this gender performance in a very outrageous and loud way. The immitation of gender performance through drag was interesting because I had never thought that drag was the immitation of everyday activity. For as Butler argues, "In immitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency" (Butler 501). Butler refers to this performance as a parody of the notion of "original gender." What I got from her article was the nonexistence of natural or "original" gender. According to Butler, "Gender is, thus, a construction that regulartly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions - and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction "compels" our belief in its necessity and naturalness" (Butler 502). I believe that what she is trying to say is that gender is a construction which tries to hide its unnaturalness based on social expectations. We then, perform within the gender binaries to be able to fit in society and thus reaffirms our beliefs that gender is a necessity and quite natural within these binaries. I admire Butler's ideas of drag and gender performance and construction. After observing my own gender cues and the way I behave, I found myself very consciously acting within the gender binary.
From "Gender Trouble", Judith Butler. Quoted from "Feminist Theory: A Reader" Second Edition, compiled by Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski.