judith “jack” halberstam on drag, gender and fashionable stupidity ...

DRAG, GENDER & FASHIONABLE STUPIDITY continued
J
udith “Jack” Halberstam is a professor
of English and director of the Center
for Feminist Research at USC. She is
the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and
the Technology of Monsters (1995), Female
Masculinity (1998), The Drag King Book
(1999, with Del LaGrace Volcano) and In a
Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives (2004). Ruth Blandón
recently sat down with her to talk about
drag, gender performance, language and
trends in gender studies, queer studies,
education, democracy and more.
RB: What is drag?
JH: Drag is a form of cabaret theater that
involves something that can be vaguely
represented as cross-dressing. In its most
common form, we see men dressing up in
outrageous ways as women and performing in
a kind of comic theater that could be called
“camp.” In its less conventional form, drag in
recent years has been women dressing as
men and creating a very different kind of
meaning and theatricality and performance.
Those are the theatrical definitions of drag.
There’s also just the basic definition of drag,
as in one person dressed in what is believed
to be the costume of the other gender. But in
an age where gender has a different kind of
flexibility to it, drag becomes less and less
clear as a cross-dress.
What do you make of Judith Butler’s
suggestion that all gender is drag?
That’s not exactly what Butler says. What
Butler is saying is that as subjects — as
people who are subject to different kinds of
disciplinary regimes — we don’t pick and
choose the forms in which subjectivity
comes. We inhabit forms that are already in
existence as ideological structures. So for
that reason she’s saying that whether you are
a man being a man, a woman being a woman,
or a woman performing in ways that are
believed to be masculine or a man performing
in ways that are believed to be feminine, all
of those kinds of gender modes are previously
scripted. Are they all drag? Well, they’re all
part of the same ideological system. You’re
not doing something unique when you enter
into that system.
Why did you decide to research and write
about drag kings?
I was writing Female Masculinity in the mid-
’90s. [That book is] a cultural history of
expressions of masculinity by female bodies
and the way in which they’ve impacted our
understanding of masculinity more generally.
I was living in New York City and there was a
sort of sudden emergence of a drag-king
scene, and I decided that what was going on
in drag-king scenes — especially because
they seem counterintuitive because we’ve
already, as a culture, decided that drag is
something that men do in women’s clothing,
not vice versa — [represented] a great
opportunity to seek out a particular kind of
knowledge about female masculinity in a
subcultural practice that I was really close to,
and happened to be in the right time and the
right place to witness, participate in and
make sense of.
That’s interesting that there was an
emergence at this moment —
Yes, what do we make of that? There wasn’t a
long history of drag-king performance, even
though there are instances of it throughout
the 20th century. If there isn’t a set role for
the drag king in lesbian culture, why would
this scene suddenly have sprung up
overnight? The answer has to do with a lot of
different things about queer or lesbian
culture in public space.
The way that I thematize it is that in
the early ’90s a lot of gay-male establishments
went bust because of the AIDS crisis. So
many men had died, and many men were no
longer going out in the way that they had to
pick each other up in bars. So, a lot of the
places — particularly in a place like San
Francisco — that had been gay men’s bars
became gay women’s spaces, and these public
spaces were available really for the first time
since the 1950s to women as gay bars.
The funny truth about lesbian culture
is that it has a kind of subterranean quality
to it because women don’t have money in the
same way that men do, and don’t have bar
cultures in the same way that men do. So this
was one of the few ways in which we could
have seen an explosion in lesbian public
culture, was that gay-male spaces get
converted to lesbian spaces, because lesbians
generally don’t own a lot of property in bars.
… And so it’s about public space, it’s about
the places that people go to socialize with
each other. If you do have an abundance of
public space, all kinds of things can happen
with it. That’s one strand.
The other part of it had to do with
the fact that during early phases of white
lesbian feminism there’d been a very vocal
disapproval of masculine women as being
part of the patriarchy. That faded as lesbian
feminism was sort of replaced by a much
more flexible postmodern feminism, and as
female-to-male transsexuals became much
more a part of queer communities in big
cities. The taboo on masculinity in lesbians
faded away.
In Female Masculinity, you mark the
difference between a drag king, who may
or may not identify as a lesbian, and the
drag butch, “a masculine woman who
wears male attire as part of her quotidian
gender expression.” What’s the political
function of each?
The drag king is a person who may or may not
be butch, who has gone to the club
specifically to perform the spectacle of
somebody who seems, at least nominally, to
be female behaving in ways that we expect
men to behave. It’s a theatrical performance.
The drag butch is a person who was born into
a female body that has basically a masculine
gender role, and who cultivates this gender
role as part of her innermost identity. It’s not
something she’s going to put on and take off
at the end of the evening. What is the
political distinction? It means everything.
It’s like, female masculinity versus the
theater of drag. One is theatrical; one is
about embodiment, a sort of cultural identity.
In Female Masculinity you write that
there’s a “continued refusal in Western
society to admit ambiguously gendered
bodies into functional social relations
(evidenced, for example, by our continued
use of either/or bathrooms ...)” You
reference the bathroom incident in Stone
Butch Blues. Why do you believe the
ambiguous body threatens? And to whom
LOUDmouth 16