The Trouble with “Queerness”: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures By Katie Rebecca Horowitz A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Catherine Cole Professor Judith Butler Fall 2012 Abstract The Trouble with “Queerness”: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures by Katie Rebecca Horowitz Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair This dissertation responds to the frequent charge within academic and activist circles that queer theory is simply gay male theory cloaked in more inclusive language. Taking as its starting point an ethnographic case study of drag king and queen performance cultures, it challenges the efficaciousness of an everything and the kitchen sink approach to queer theorizing and organizing. This work constitutes the first academic monograph centered on queer life in Cleveland, Ohio and is also the first to focus simultaneously on kinging and queening, a lacuna at once explained by and demanding interrogation of the fact that these practices have almost nothing in common with each other. Despite the shared heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions overlap little with respect to audience, movement vocabulary, stage persona, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. The radical (in)difference between these genres serves as a microcosmic representation of the perennial rift between lesbians and gay men and highlights the heteronormativity of the assumption that all of the identity categories subsumed under (and often eclipsed by) the queer umbrella ought a priori to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise. I argue instead for the legitimacy of studies that focus exclusively on e.g., gay men or lesbians or transsexuals, free from the intersectional compulsion to extrapolate one’s claims to the rest of the queer spectrum. The first two chapters detail the generic constitutions of queening and kinging, arguing that the ideal of femininity operating in the former is far more fixed and hegemonic than the ideal of masculinity produced in the latter. Chapter 3 uses archival images to locate these contemporary performances within a gestural lineage dating as far back as the late nineteenth century. Such genealogical evidence contextualizes the development of kinging and queening as distinct performance practices and foregrounds their respective roles in producing the discrete and relatively coherent cultural iterations we conventionally label “lesbian” and “gay male.” Synthesizing these ethnographic and archival findings, Chapter 4 suggests that contemporary U.S. drag queens rely on the invisibility of real world social structures (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, class) to reinforce the illusion of their own celebrity. I attribute this tendency to the imbrication of gay male kinship rituals with colonialist discourse, a rhetorical paradigm popularized over the last half-century by the gay service 1 organization the International Court System (ICS). Drawing on recent critiques of gay urbanism, homonormativity, and homonationalism, I problematize the ICS’s mobilization of imperialism as a rhetoric of community-building. Such rhetoric exemplifies the exclusionary uses of “queer” described above, and in the final chapter I propose a theory of omniperformance, a relational metaphysics of identity performance, as a solution to the paradox that queer discourse simultaneously seeks to erase differences (by insisting on the inclusion of an ever-expanding array of non-normative genders and sexualities) and to maintain differences (by framing some bodies and lives as queerer than others). The most significant conclusion of this work is that there is no difference between performance and performativity, that the rhetorical distinction between the two has exhausted its utility, and that omniperformance, a paradigm based on an ontology of bodily intra-action, accounts for both the theoretical fluidity and the apparent fixity of individual identity. Consequently, my theory decentralizes language as the sole or primary arbiter of subjecthood and affirms that bodies share in the work of identity formation. As such, it transports us across the critical impasse that performativity grants language limitless power to make, break, and subvert identities while glossing over the material conditions and consequences of having a (particularly gendered, sexed, raced, and classed) body. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ............................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... v Introduction “Radically Different Agendas” ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Kinging ......................................................................................................................... 9 Performing subordinate masculinities .............................................................................. 13 Performing marginalized masculinities ............................................................................ 20 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 24 Chapter 2 Queening .................................................................................................................... 27 A class apart: drag queens, celebrity, and the abstraction of wealth ................................ 28 Iconic sexuality and the impossibility of race ................................................................... 30 Poetics of earnestness, poetics of camp: drag and genre .................................................. 36 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 38 Chapter 3 Gesturing Back: A Phenomenology of Drag Performance ............................................ 40 Gestures as gendered ........................................................................................................ 41 A gestural genealogy of drag ............................................................................................. 46 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 51 Chapter 4 Manifest Faggotry: The Imperial Court System and the Queer Jingoism of the Western Metropole ............................................................................................................... 53 Origin stories .................................................................................................................... 54 Metropo-telos .................................................................................................................... 56 Manifest destiny? ............................................................................................................... 59 Homonorm, homonation: Nicole Murray-Rodriguez and the “real” politics of “faux” empire ....................................................................................................................... 62 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 67 Chapter 5 Toward a Theory of Omniperformance ....................................................................... 69 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 82 Appendix: Images ....................................................................................................... 86 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 a. William Lingard cabinet card, Portrait miscellany [graphic], BANC PIC 1976.002— POR, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. b. Advertisement for Finocchio’s, Box 17, Folder 9, World War II Project Papers, 1995-16, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, San Francisco, California. c. Photograph of Empress Shirley, Coronation Ball, 1971 program, Sexuality and gender collection, CU-BANC, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Figure 2 a. Photograph of Julian Eltinge as “The Gibson Girl,” Julian Eltinge Photographs and Printed Materials, Ralph W. Judd Collection on Cross-Dressing in the Performing Arts, Coll2007-020, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California. b. Photograph of unidentified drag queen, Coronation Ball, 1971 program, Sexuality and gender collection, CU-BANC, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Figure 3 a. Photograph of Julian Eltinge as “The Fascinating Widow,” Julian Eltinge Photographs and Printed Materials, Ralph W. Judd Collection on Cross-Dressing in the Performing Arts, Coll2007-020, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California. b. Photograph of Jean La Monte, Box 1, Folder 5, Maurice and La Monte papers, Coll2008-033, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California. c. Photograph of Sahdji in Drag Queen, Sexuality and gender collection, CU-BANC, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. d. Photograph of Shari Turner by Abe Robinson, Blind 7 Photography, Cleveland, Ohio. Figure