I have just been reading this interesting article on drag and wondered what others thought? Below is an extract.
www.wbez.org/blog/city-room-blog/onstagebackstage-drag-sexist
"What?s so funny about drag, anyway? Maybe it?s the simple incongruity: you can always knock ?em dead with chest hair pouring out of an evening gown?s cleavage. But this seems like a pretty thin joke on which to hang decades of amusement. Unless you think men are from Mars and women from Venus?that is, that differences in gender behavior are huge and immutable?the contrast doesn?t hold much interest. Certainly, the contrast between white performers and black characters was not enough in and of itself to make blackface funny. There had to be something else?and there was.
There was ridicule of African-Americans. ?Look how silly they are! But look how they laugh, and doesn?t that prove they?re happy in the confinement in which we?ve placed them?? Likewise, men who dress up as women and adopt stereotyped feminine behaviors are comical because of their stereotyped behavior, and the inference the audience is encouraged to draw is not that stereotypes are comical but that women are.
Just as in blackface African-Americans were shown singing, or dancing, or being foolish, or longing for the old plantation, in drag women are shown nagging, or domineering, or primping, or longing for male protection. Each form even has two insulting ?types.? Blackface offers Zip Coon (an urban dandy out of his depth) and Sambo (a shuffling rural fool), the first making fun of black people for being free and the second for being slaves. Drag presents the Glamor Girl and the Pantomime Dame, the first making fun of women for our sexuality and the second for our lack of it."