Drag (entertainment)
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Drag is a performance of exaggerated femininity, masculinity, or other forms of gender expression, usually for entertainment purposes. Drag usually involves cross-dressing. A drag queen is someone (usually male) who performs femininely and a drag king is someone (usually female) who performs masculinely. Performances often involve comedy, social satire, and at times political commentary.[1][2][3] The term may be used as a noun as in the expression in drag or as an adjective as in drag show.[4]
Etymology
The use of "drag" in this sense appeared in print as early as 1870[5][6] but its origin is uncertain. One suggested etymological root is 19th-century theatre slang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor.[7] It may have been based on the term "grand rag" which was historically used for a masquerade ball.[8]
In folk custom
Men dressed as women have been featured in certain traditional customs for centuries. For example, the characters of some regional variants of the traditional mummers' play, which were traditionally always performed by men, include Besom Bet(ty); numerous variations on Bessy or Betsy; Bucksome Nell; Mrs Clagdarse; Dame Dolly; Dame Dorothy; Mrs Finney; Mrs Frail; and many others.[9]
The variant performed around Plough Monday in Eastern England is known as the Plough Play[10] (also Wooing Play or Bridal Play)[11] and usually involves two female characters, the young "Lady Bright and Gay" and "Old Dame Jane" and a dispute about a bastard child.[12] A character called Bessy also accompanied the Plough Jags (also known as Plough Jacks, Plough Stots, Plough Bullocks, etc.) even in places where no play was performed: "she" was a man dressed in women's clothes, who carried a collecting box[10] for money and other largesse.
"Maid Marian" of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is played by a man, and the Maid Marians referred to in old documents as having taken part in May Games and other festivals with Morris dancers would most probably also have been men. The "consort" of the Castleton Garland King was traditionally a man (until 1956, when a woman took over the role) and was originally simply referred to as "The Woman".[10]
Theatre
Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are a widespread and longstanding cultural phenomena.
The ancient Roman playwright Plautus' (c. 254 – 184 BCE) Menaechmi includes a scene in which Menaechmus I puts on his wife's dress, then wears a cloak over it, intending to remove the dress from the house and deliver it to his mistress.[13][14][15] Menaechmus says: "Look at me. Do I look the part?" [Age me aspice. ecquid adsimulo similiter?] Peniculus responds: "What in the world have you got on?!" [Quis istest ornatus tuos?] Menaechmus says: "Tell me I am gorgeous." [Dic hominem lepidissimum esse me.][16][17]
In England, actors in
In the 1890s the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions (notably
The plot device of the film
Within the dramatic fiction, a
These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigid gender roles were undermined and began to dissolve. This evolution changed drag in the last decades of the 20th century. Among contemporary drag performers, the theatrical drag queen or street queen may at times be seen less as a "
Ball culture
Ballroom culture (also known as "ball culture", and other names) is an underground
Ball culture first gained exposure to a mainstream audience in 1990 when its
Opera
In Baroque opera, where soprano roles for men were sung by
Film and television
The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas' Charley's Aunt (London, 1892) were still viable theatre material in La Cage aux Folles (1978), which was remade, as The Birdcage, as late as 1996.
Dame Edna,[38] the drag persona of Australian actor Barry Humphries, was the host of several specials, including The Dame Edna Experience. Dame Edna also toured internationally, playing to sell-out crowds, and appeared on TV's Ally McBeal. Dame Edna represented an anomalous example of the drag concept. Her earliest incarnation was unmistakably a man dressed (badly) as a suburban housewife. Edna's manner and appearance became so feminised and glamorised that even some of her TV show guests appear not to see that the Edna character was played by a man.[39] The furor surrounding Dame Edna's "advice" column in Vanity Fair magazine suggests that one of her harshest critics, actress Salma Hayek, was unaware Dame Edna was a female character played by a man.
In 2009, RuPaul's Drag Race first premiered as a television show in the United States. The show has gained mainstream and global appeal, and it has exposed multiple generations of audiences to drag culture.[40]
United States
In the United States, early examples of drag clothing can be found in gold rush saloons of California. The Barbary Coast district of San Francisco was known for certain saloons, such as Dash, which attracted female impersonator patrons and workers.[41]
William Dorsey Swann was the first person to call himself "queen of drag". He was a former slave, who was freed after the American Civil War, from Maryland. By the 1880s, he was organizing and hosting drag balls in Washington, D.C. The balls included folk dances, such as the cakewalk, and the male guests often dressed in female clothing.[42]
In the early 20th century, drag—as an art form and culture—began to flourish with minstrel shows and vaudeville. Performers such as Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne were drag queens and vaudeville performers. The Progressive Era brought a decline in vaudeville entertainment, but drag culture began to grow in nightclubs and bars, such as Finnochio's Club and Black Cat Bar in San Francisco.[41]
During this period, Hollywood films included examples of drag. While drag was often used as a last-resort tactic in situational farce (its only permissible format at the time), some films provided a more empathetic lens than others. In 1919, Bothwell Browne appeared in Yankee Doodle in Berlin.[43] In 1933, Viktor und Viktoria came out in Germany, which later inspired First a Girl (1935) in the United States.[44] That same year, Katharine Hepburn played a character who dressed as a male in Sylvia Scarlett.[45] In 1959, drag made a big Hollywood splash in Some Like It Hot (1959).[46][47]
In the 1960s, Andy Warhol and his Factory scene included superstar drag queens, such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, both immortalized in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side".[48]
By the early 1970s, drag was influenced by the
For many decades, American
On stage and screen, the actor-playwright-screenwriter-producer Tyler Perry has included his drag character of Madea in some of his most noted productions, such as the stage play Diary of a Mad Black Woman and the feature film he based upon it.[55]
Maximilliana and RuPaul co-star together in the TV show Nash Bridges starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin during the two-part episode "'Cuda Grace". Maximilliana, looking passable, leads one of the investigators to believe he is "real" and sexually advances only to learn that he is, in fact, male, much to his chagrin.[56]
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, drag has been more common in comedy, on both film and television.
On television,
Monty Python women, whom the troupe called
In the 1970s the most familiar drag artist on British television was
In the UK, non-comedic representations of drag acts are less common, and usually a subsidiary feature of another story. A rare exception is the television play (1968) and film (1973) The Best Pair of Legs in the Business. In the film version Reg Varney plays a holiday camp comedian and drag artist whose marriage is failing.[65]
Canada
Early representations of drag in Canadian film included the 1971 film Fortune and Men's Eyes, adapted from a theatrical play by John Herbert,[66] and the 1974 film Once Upon a Time in the East, adapted from a theatrical play by Michel Tremblay.[67]
The 1977 film Outrageous!, starring Canadian drag queen Craig Russell as a fictionalized version of himself, was an important milestone in Canadian film, as one of the first gay-themed films ever to receive widespread theatrical distribution in North America.[68] A sequel film, Too Outrageous!, was released in 1987.[69]
In the 1980s, the sketch comedy series
The Canadian film
The short-lived French-language sitcom
In 2017
Canada's Drag Race, a Canadian spinoff of the American RuPaul's Drag Race franchise, was launched in 2020 on Crave.[78] The same year also saw the release of Phil Connell's film Jump, Darling, centred on a young aspiring drag queen,[79] and Thom Fitzgerald's film Stage Mother, about a religious woman who inherits her son's drag club after his death,[80] as well as the comedy web series Queens, starring several real Toronto-area drag queens.[81] 2023 saw the release of the films Enter the Drag Dragon,[82] Solo,[83] Gamodi[84] and Queen Tut.[85]
Music
The world of
In the
The male
, and many others.In Japan there are several musicians in the visual kei scene, such as Mana (Moi dix Mois and Malice Mizer), Kaya (Schwarz Stein), Hizaki and Jasmine You (both Versailles), who always or usually appear in full or semi-drag.
Drag kings and queens
A
A
See also
- En femme
- List of transgender-related topics
- List of drag queens
- Travesti (theatre)
References
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I know what "in drag" means; it is the slang for going about in women's clothes.
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Within the drag community, 'faux queen' is the title used for a woman who performs as a drag queen.
Further reading
- Padva, Gilad (2000). "Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture". Journal of Communication Inquiry. 24 (2): 216–243. S2CID 144510862.