A Critical Exploration of Cross-Dressing and Drag in Gender Performance and Camp in Contemporary North American Drama and Film
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A CRITICAL EXPLORATION OF CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG IN GENDER PERFORMANCE AND CAMP IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN DRAMA AND FILM Romy Sara Shiller A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirernents for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Centre for Study of Drama University of Toronto O Copyright by Romy Sara Shiller 1999 National Library Bibliothèque nationale I*I of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference Our file Notre refërence The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in rnicroform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT A Critical Exploration of Cross-Dressing and Drag Gender Performance and Camp in Contemporary North American Drarna and Film Graduate Centre For Study of Drarna Romy Sara Shiller Universiîv of Toronto Doctor of Philosophy 1999 My thesis focuses on drag as a major component of camp in relation to gender performance. My position on drag for the purposes of this thesis is that drag's hnction mithin camp is about challenging and disrupting normative notions of gender and sexuality. 1 examine how cross-dressing located in sexual difference and imbricated by models of expressivity has complicated the perceived potential for drag and camp to challenge and normative. notions of gender sexuality. Chapter one shows how performance metaphors for gender located in the act of cross-dressing reinscribe traditional notions of personhood. Chapter hvo shows that drag rnoves off the binaries of man and woman, and sexual difference located in cross-dressing, by usinp the noms associated with sexual difference and mandatory heterosexuality to resist the noms. This moves cross-dressing into the realm of drag and gender play. I use hvo Hollywood films to illustrate that while cross-dressing is incorporated into drag and gender play, cross- dressing alone does not signal drag. Likewïse camp uses parody, but parody alone is not camp. Chapter three explores notions of "identity" and the need to open up certain theoretical discourses, specifically feminist and lesbian theoretical discourses, which are still bound to conventional notions about camp, to aitical revision. In this chapter The Greater Toronto Drag King Society's performances illustrate camp's potential to articulate genders and sexualities bevond the traditional binaries. Chapter four moves into the possibilities for the proliferation of identities in drag and camp. Drag is theorized as "cross-speaes-dressingf' in examples where animais, people and machines are entangled in complex hybnd relationships which explode notions of the organic dimensions of body as self. The cvborg is a fasanating but until now unexplored application in which to consider "couplings" which undo normative notions of gender and sexuality in drag and camp. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 would Like to express my sincere gratitude to mv thesis cornmittee members, Prof. Nancy Copeland and Prof- Richard Plant, for their insightful comments and encouragement throughout the writing of mv dissertation. I am especially gratefd to my supervisor, Prof. Cary1 Flim for her supportive guidance and thoughtful commentarv on my work. 1 would also like to thank Dr. Marlene Moser for her helpful suggestions and Dr. Shelley Scott for her support. 1 owe a great ded of gratitude to the performers and filmmakers who graciously shared their work with me including Joy "Donny Osmondf' Lachica, Rose "Mama Tallulah" Pem, all of the members of the Greater Toronto Drag King Society and Keith Cole. My work would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of my exhaordinary Mends. 1 want to thank my brother Warren Shiller for the influence of his exceptional integritv and mv brother Douglas Shiller who alwavs inspires me to "boldly go.. ." 1am grateful to my parents Lillian and Bryant Shiller for their love, and to my dear grandparents Linda and Ezra Zynger for their faith in me. CONTENTS Introduction Chapter I: Gender Performance and Camp Chapter II: Drag: An Elementary Fabnc of Camp Chapter III: Fernale Camp Chapter IV: Entangled Identities and Cyborg Temtories Conclusion Appendix A List of Works Cited You're bom naked and everything you put on after that is drag. RuPaul (Drag Diaries) INTRODUCTION The focus of my thesis is on drag as a major component of camp in relation to gender performance. My position on drag for the purposes of this thesis is that drag's hinction within camp is about chalienging and disrupting normative notions of gender and sexuality. Drag articulates camp's fascination with gender and sexual identity, and disrupts identities bound to traditional notions of gender and sexuality. 1 am defining drag, a term traditionally conflated and used ïnterchangeably 146th cross-dressing, beyond sartorial address. Drag encornpasses gender play and indudes props, costumes, role playing and reversais. Drag moves off strict binaries and into self-aware and self-reflexive discourses, effecting fluid representations of gender and the fragmentation of conventional gender boundaries. The conflation of the tems drag and cross-dresse hinders drag's potentid to move beyond the binary of man and woman and heterosexual sexuality, a bi?ary usually located in the traditional usage of the term cross- dressing. As we see in chapter three on "Female Camp," the inability of some theorists to regard camp as a powerful site at which to articulate femùust and lesbian discourse and subversive gender play is based on their limiting drag to cross-dressing. Drag expands upon the notion of cross-dressing, utilking the idea of aossing over to somethùig other than what is expected or within the boundaries of a contained self. Within drag, cross-dressing often appears as metaphor, as is exemplified in chapter three, and moves into a notion of post- cross-dressing as shown in chapter four, "Entangled Identities and Cyborg Temtories," where issues of fluid identity, gender and sexiiality are hyperbolized and exploded. Chapter One: Gender Performance and Camp Chapter one will investigate some of the discourses and assumptions around gender performance and performativitv. 1 w~illexplore notions in contemporary a-itical theory of performance as a metaphor for the constitution of gender. Performance metaphors foreground certain qualities which are shared arnong theatre, gender and camp but have, even as Judith Butler (1997) now admits, limitations. Problems for the metaphor often arise when it is intertwined with expressive models for gender behaviour and sexuat difierence. Cross-dressing, for example, is often seen as the literal performance of and answer to the "constmction" of gender, by performing gender on the "wrong" body. This chapter begins to introduce the problem of cross-dressing as a tool to subvert normative notions of gender and sexuality. Drag in relation to cross-dressing wiU be addressed in chapter two. Readings of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990a) have contributed to certain assumptions which are held in relation to performance metaphors. Bv addressing her concerns with performance metaphors, specifically models of "expressiviS," 1 situate the way 1 wdl be using the notion of gender performance and performativity throughout my thesis. Judith Butler's work will be applied within a specific framework. Butler does not make the distinction between drag and cross-dressing which complicates even her correctives to certain readings of her work on drag. She notes nghtly that there are no more than five paragraphs on drag in her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990a), vet drag has been ated @ readers as the example which explainç the meaning of performativity. Gender performativity has been read as that which constitutes what gender one is based on what one performs (Butler 1997, 19).' She rejects the conclusion that gender can be proliferated beyond the binq of "man and wornan" depending on what one performs because thiç assumption valorizes drag as the paradigm of gender performance and as the means by which heterosexual presumption might be undermined through a strategy of proliferation (19). Heterosexual presurnption cannot be undermined through strategies of proMeration in this context because proliferation is tied to expressive models of performance. "Drag," in Butler's corrective to the possibilities for proliferation, is an expressive model which holds that some interior tmth is exteriorized in performance. I agree that proliferation is not the answer to the binarv positions of man and woman that are upheld in cross-dressing, nor does it undermine heterosexual presumption. As 1 will show in chapter two however, moving off a model of cross-dressing into a paradigm of drag enables a re-vision of the notion of proliferation. Removed from the arena of cross-dressing, drag entails notions of layering and combining in mv analysis. This openç up the possibilities for the proliferation of meanings which challenge normative notions of gender and sexuality. In addition to Butler not making the distinction between cross-dressing and drag, drag is related to "melancholia" for Butler and is constituted as an ungrieved loss for the Other / Object (1997). Based on psychoanalytic models, which I am not using in this thesis, her analysis is entrenched in forms of identification dosely tied to those models.