The most glamorous girls in town are boys.

[PhyllisDoris]

How is this ok, but dressing up as a black person isn't?

Isn't it about time men dressing as a parody of women was banned?

I haven't worn a dress for decades! What I am saying is that at the time when drag became popular (especially with the north working-class (Danny LaRue etc)) it was not unusual for women from that culture to get dressed up to the nines on a regular basis. In fact if you consider a predominantly working-class city like Liverpool, regularly criticised on here for the way the women dress, there is still a sense of women wanting to be perceived as glamorous.

They are not really breaking gender norms though are they? They are saying this is what a woman looks like. The whole point is that they are presenting as women.

If men routinely wore bright lipstick, tight clothes and high heels, drag would disappear because it would have nothing to subvert.

I'm still a bit on the fence about this, though. But as gender stereotyping has been brought to the forefront politically, I can see how drag is now being held up to scrutiny.

Watching with interest.

How many women here wear trousers or shirts? For a long, long time, they were deemed 'menswear' but no one bats an eyelid any more. So why can't a man wear a dress?!

klaphat what?

Datun well it would be a bit shit if they came on stage in jegging and a hoody and pretended to be a woman. I like the glamour.

jonesy

I like glamour too!

But I've acquired late onset feminism.

I keep having to re-evaluate through a different lens.

Well I'm a feminist too and I am NOT getting down on drag queens. I have some very close friends who do cabaret and sometimes perform in drag and I can PROMISE you now that coming after drag is not something feminists need to bother about.

I can PROMISE you now that coming after drag is not something feminists need to bother about.

Why's that?

I've seen posters say that drag queens have a downer on women, and I've seen others who say they are more artists than anything else.

Do the ones you know cross-dress in real life?

I can PROMISE you now that coming after drag is not something feminists need to bother about.

It does sit within feminist discourse, though. Drag queening is, at its heart, about using costume and mannerism to portray a male performer as female. It both relies on and propogates a stereotype: that "woman" is synonymous with pretty dresses, high heels, glitter and lipstick, and behaviour which is sexually provocative and "bitchy" or "catty". It's not a performance which sits in cultural isolation.

Drag kinging is also based within stereotype but the dynamic is different, because it's about the historically oppressed assuming the power of the historical oppressor. For the same reason, black people "whiting up" would never carry the same weight of offensiveness as white people "blacking up" does.

I find drag really insulting.

I would find it insulting if it was positioned as men having fun with different clothes & Make Up.

But drag performers do this horrible caricature of what they think women are like.

As previous posters have said, it's equivalent to black face.

It's the people with all the political power making fun of caricaturing those without political power.

If it were just about lipstick nail varnish etc. why do they take great pains to have fake boobs etc.?

That should read "I WOULDN'T find it insulting if it was positioned as men having fun with different clothes & Make Up.

What about ordinary transvestites? Are they wrong to want to wear fake breasts?

"They are a caricature of hyper femininity"... THIS! That's why it's uncomfortable, and the parallels with black face (minstrels/golliwogs) come up. Overexaggerating stereotypical features, in order to ridicule them. Plus a bit of fetishism with the tights, silk,make up... It certainly doesn't feel like love or honour.

I don't really have an opinion but I live in the same town as you

Cowgirls - they can wear what they want.

My objection to drag queens isn't that they are wearing make up, nails, fake breasts, it's that they are saying that this whole package = woman.

And their horrible, mean, sexist caricatures of "bitchy" and "catty" behaviours that according to them, all women have.

You have to ask yourselves, would you find it entertaining if someone in black face were caricaturing black stereotypes in the same way? I think most people would rightly think it was incredibly racist.

It's just as sexist for the same thing to be happening to women.

This thread's really going to piss me off.

Christ

Drag has a fine tradition in entertainment. I don't see as having any bearing at all on my life as a woman.
Love a good drag act

Minstrel shows used to have a long history in entertainment.

Longevity is a piss poor excuse for the rampant sexism of Drag acts.

I wasn't aware drag queens were trying to define themselves as what women should be at all. Just as I don't think the Moulin Rouge dancers are defining of womanhood either.

You know they are not pretending to be women, they are drag artists. It's a caricature. Played for laughs and usually the joke's on them. And some brilliant singers too. And humour.

Leave them alone.

How are they not pretending to be women? What are they being?

They are caricaturing women. The joke is on women.

I don't think drag artists are attempting to define what a woman is.

I think they are caricaturing what they think women are, which reveals their hugely sexist attitudes towards women.

Aloysha you do realise there's such a thing as Drag Kings right?

www.ranker.com/list/best-drag-kings/famous-gay-and-lesbian

Gay culture has always played with gender.

It was long a part of their underground scene. When it was still illegal to be gay, dressing up as a "cissy" in secret gay clubs was a way to say Fuck You to the system.

And Drag Kings did it too.

Drag is as like punk as it is like anything. It's going nowhere.

And all those saying it's caricaturing femininity have NO idea about the ethos and art behind drag today.

It's fuck all to do with lack of respect for women. It's everything to do with celebrating women.