UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Critical Crossings: Intersections of Passing and Drag in Popular Culture A dissertation in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s Studies by Loran Renee Marsan 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Critical Crossings: Intersections of Passing and Drag in Popular Culture by Loran Renee Marsan Doctor of Philosophy in Women’s Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Juliet Williams, Co-chair Professor Douglas Kellner, Co-chair My dissertation, Critical Crossings: Intersections of Passing and Drag in Popular Culture, offers an innovative study of the political possibilities of two related performative strategies: Drag and Passing. “Drag” refers to the excessive performance of feminine gender, i.e. drag queens, but more recently has been linked to other parodic performances such as blackface. “Passing” originated in the post- and antebellum eras when mixed-race African-Americans passed as white to escape oppressions. It denotes the believable portrayal of another identity, usually racial or gendered. Both have long been topics of media representations. Probing where and how they are used differently in popular culture yields insight into the operation of identity, engaging such issues as the social construction of authenticity, performance, and the “real.” I argue cinema and television have changed how drag and passing are deployed, such that what ii passes for reality and authenticity comes into question while the purposes and functions of drag and passing are also changed. I utilize an interdisciplinary multiperspectival cultural studies approach that draws connections across fields of inquiry and theoretical paradigms. Through analysis of context, production, and reception of texts with theoretical insights from queer, feminist, critical race, film, media, and cultural studies, this project shows how these theories can align to create new knowledges about the subversive potential of drag and passing. A series of four case studies that range from Cher, to journalistic passing texts such as Black Like Me and the TV series Black. White., to Divine and John Waters, to Stephen Colbert as pundit passing-in- drag, my dissertation critically reapplies passing and drag to unconventional texts or in unconventional ways to broaden their critical cache while using their unique parameters to reinterpret representational politics in media texts to reveal what has not been seen through traditional critiques of the politics of representation of identity, authenticity, and reality. The resulting analyses show the possible shifting multiplicities not only of identity but also reality and how producing and consuming media through the optics of passing and drag can take authenticity out of the identity equation and redirect attention to aspects of performance, repetition, and modification. iii The dissertation of Loran Renee Marsan is approved. Christine Littleton Elizabeth Marchant Sue-Ellen Case Juliet Williams, Committee Co-chair Douglas Kellner, Committee Co-chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Introduction: Passing/Drag/Media/………………………………………………………..1 Chapter Two Cher-ing/Sharing Across Boundaries……………………………………………...…….58 Chapter Three Divine Intervention: Passing-In-Drag in an Abject Reality…………………..………….86 Chapter Four Passing Truths: Journalism, Education, and the Experience of Authenticity…………..129 Chapter Five Celebripunditician: Truthiness in the Language of Passing and Drag……………….…170 Conclusion Passing-In-Drag Toward a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow……………………………...235 References………………………………………………………………………………………244 v VITA/BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Education University of Arizona, M.A. in Women’s Studies, August, 2004. University of California at Santa Barbara, B.A. in Women’s Studies and English, June 2002. Publications “Cher-ing/Sharing Across Boundaries.” In Visual Culture and Gender Vol. 5, 2010. Pp. 49-64. (http://128.118.229.237/vcg/) “Creating New Spaces in Third Cinema: Trinh T. Minh-Ha Rewrites the Narrative of Nationalism With Love.” In Refractory journal Vol. 9, 2006. (www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au) “Creating New Spaces in Third Cinema: Trinh T. Minh-Ha Rewrites the Narrative of Nationalism With Love.” Truthseekers at Culture Unplugged multimedia website. Film, Media & Consciousness edition. Invited republication, September 29, 2011. (http://truthseekers.cultureunplugged.com/truth_seekers/2011/09/creating-new-spaces-in- third-cinema-trinh-t-minh-ha-rewrites-the-narrative-of-nationalism-with-love.html) Presentations “Passing in Drag: Trashing Identities in John Waters’ Films.” Ohio University Women’s Center, Athens, Ohio. Brown Bag Lunch and Learn invited lecture, October 27, 2011. “The Divine Abject: Passing-In-Drag in a Carnivalesque Reality.” 9th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu, HI, January 9-12, 2011. vi “Sharing/Chering Across Boundaries.” Women’s Studies Collaborative Graduate Conference at Emory University, March 31 – April 1, 2007. “Constructing Landed Hegemony: Race and Class in Emma.” Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1830. University of South Hampton and Chawton House Library. Winchester, England, July 15-17, 2003. “Emma: Premodern and Postmodern Representations of Difference.” New Directions in Critical Theory: Theory Matters. University of Arizona, April 18-19, 2003. Selected Academic and Professional Experience Thinking From Women’s Lives: Sandra Harding, Standpoint, and Science 31 min. educational/ documentary video produced for UCLA’s Women’s Studies Program, 2007. Teaching Fellow, UCLA: Women’s Studies 185-1: Crossings in Popular Culture: The Politics of Representation of Drag and Passing, Winter 2010. Women’s Studies/Communications M149: Media: Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality, Summer 2009. Teaching Associate, UCLA: Women’s Studies/Communications M149: Winter 2009, Spring 2008. Women’s Studies/Education 178/278: Critical Media Literacy and Politics of Gender: Theory and Production, Fall 2008, Winter 2007. Women’s Studies 10: Intro to Women’s Studies: Feminist Perspectives – Women and Society, Winter 2006, Fall 2005, Winter 2005. vii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: PASSING/DRAG/MEDIA/ The very nature of acting itself is about passing; passing oneself off as an/other and, in the process, throwing off the shackles of any natural or normed identity markers. – Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture, 2005: 8. In 1914 the major motion picture A Florida Enchantment was released. Based on a novel and play from the 1890s, this comedy features magic seeds that change the sex of the recipients. Unhappy with her fiancé’s apparent lack of attention to her, the main character Lillian Travers (whose name is telling in itself) takes the magic seed and instantly starts to perform in stereotypical masculine fashion, which includes strutting about, lighting her/his own cigarettes and flirting with all the women around while still in a dress, much to the dismay of her fiancé. The film has been acclaimed as one of the first cinematic representations of homosexuality because of the gender-bending theme enacted not only through the taking of the pills and subsequent actions but also shifts between masculine and feminine dress throughout that allows for multiple flirtations where it is unclear who is “really” male or female within the film as well as to the audience. This representation has been labeled in varying arguments as passing, drag, and/or butch lesbianism (Somerville, 2000). This film also features white actors in blackface who are portrayed in the era’s usual racist manner in which presents African Americans as intellectually challenged, bumbling, and/or as savages who are objects of ridicule and “comic foils.” Hence, the “hilarity” of such a transformation is intensified when the now manly Lillian/Lawrence forces her/his maid (a white woman in blackface) to swallow the seed as well. It all ends up being a fanciful dream from which the heroine learns her lesson and is now satisfied again with her femininity and her fiancé. Her maid, who endured being punched through a curtain, having things thrown at her, and who generally acted the foolish buck while 1 transformed, is absent from the ending entirely. These multiple identity boundaries crossed throughout the film open a space to critique the polysemic meanings and messages of the movie. While some of the gender boundary crossings might be seen as subversive, the ending (changed greatly from the original novel and play) creates a picture of heterosexual static identity and the representations of blackface are wholly racist and not addressed within the film (or outside of it at the time) as a topic of boundary crossing at all. This film is an interesting example of how multiple identity boundary crossings are simultaneously deployed, encoding both progressive and hegemonic meanings where the contested terrain of the film can only be understood when they are all addressed together in their contradictory and complex relations. When looking at both the gendered and racial aspects of A Florida Enchantment and comparing how they are enacted, a conclusion about the progressive possibility of such a film is hard to achieve given its portrayal of female-to-male transformation as beneficial for the white woman, yet detrimental to the “black” woman and white man. Indeed, the consequences of the change in her maid-turned-valet are intensified savagery and foolishness,