COMEDY

GENDER AND SEXUALITY 69If this is the case, and we can think of drag as an interrogation ofgender, one that breaks the link between biologically determinedcategories and socially constructed conceptions of sex, then femaleimpersonation may constitute a rebuttal of prescriptive roles and anexploration of alternative genders and sexualities. As we have seen,there is a large body of work that puts momentum behind the argumentthat comic inversion can be a political force, so why not extend it toinclude drag? If we accept this argument, then we would also be able toapply it, as some Shakespearean critics have done already, to the‘progress narrative’. In this revised version, Shakespearean crossdressingis not simply explained by ‘holiday humours’, but is apoliticized investigation of gender hierarchies that questions theinferiority of women at a time when the assumption of male superioritywas overwhelming. Drag is the vehicle of this investigation as it focusesthe attention on the sartorial symbols of gender and recontextualizesthem in a way that might lead us to question their cultural power.The most radical and influential theorist of drag has been theAmerican critic Judith Butler, whose work touches on cross-dressing byway of a larger argument about the fluidity of gender identities. Butler’sposition can be broadly characterized as ‘anti-essentialist’ in that sheargues for a concept of gender that is not built on a foundation ofbiology or other predetermined generative categories, but one that iscontinually ‘iterated’ through the ‘performances’ of gender required byculture. Thus we make our gender by performing the expressions thatare culturally characteristic of it. ‘In this sense, gender is always adoing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist thedeed’, she writes; ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions ofgender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very“expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990:25). It shouldbe noted that ‘gender identity’ is not identical to biological sex, butrather the gender with which the subject identifies him or herself,irrespective of their anatomically prescribed or medically understoodgender. Traditional feminist responses to drag and cross-dressing,claims Butler, have viewed it as either degrading to women, or as ‘anuncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within thepractice of heterosexuality’ (Butler, 1990:137). Rather than arguing thepolitics of drag from the point of view of drag relying on a discrepancybetween the biological sex of the performer and the gender that is beingperformed, Butler insists that there are three categories at work:‘anatomical gender, gender identity, and the gender that is beingperformed’ (Butler, 1990:137). As she writes,