Guardian journalist: Don't debate drag

[RoyalCorgi]

Guardian journalists, eh? They never tire of telling women to shut up:

twitter.com/ChrisPJGodfrey/status/1209040941648138240

You said, "it [blackface] has been used as the costume when attacking/lynching Black people"
I'd like to see a source for this also. I'm American and I've always understood the KKK did their terrorizing dressed in their bedsheets. It's only since people began comparing womanface to blackface that I've seen this claim surface. I wasn't convinced by the Twitter thread either. It's possible of course but if there's evidence presented in that thread, I missed it

Interesting points eloquently put by several people here, thank you.

isn't it nice to be able to discuss things without men telling us we can't

I smile a wry smile at;

drspouse

Blackface isn't just a caricature, it has been used as the costume when attacking/lynching Black people.
That's why.

Bevause without in any way meaning to belittle violence against black people (and I'm still not sure of specific examples of blackface's role in this) ... have you seen the video earlier on the thread where a drag queen pushes a woman off the stage?! And I have personally been grabbed in a headlock from behind and pulled backwards by a bloke in full false eyelashes make up, black wig, well over 6ft in platform heels and a shiney leopardprint hot pants playsuit that very much left genital arrangements under no doubt, while he screamed directly into my ear "COME ON BITCHES!!" ...at pride this year. .... I appreciate my experience isn't one that many people have had, but the drag queens on stage in the gaybars I went to in my youth hated women and were bitchy as hell to them, both on stage in character and off. I'm the wrong person to tell that that's a difference between black and woman face

Right, I did a quick search and there are a few women drag queens (as in not trans) and it's been called cultural appropriation. Hah.

it's been called cultural appropriation

don't really do irony do TRAs

No, not by TRAs. By gays & other drag fans.

...but I'm sure TRAs think male drag is appropriation.

Something like Drag Race, though, is offensive. It is laughing at women, not with us.

In some instances I think the problem is more that the performers aren't really that good. Good comedy usually has to include some witty insights, it's difficult to do well, and requires a level of intelligence and creativity and sensitivity.
It's easy for someone who doesn't have these things to accidentally make comedy that seems offensive, because it doesn't have the little twist, the absurdity that makes us laugh, that helps us accept what is a slighly uncomfortable truth.

But drag directly makes fun of sex role stereotypes that are harmful to women and used to keep us in our place below men in the gender hierarchy.

I would not say that making fun of sex role stereotypes is akin to making fun of women, in fact it could be quite the opposite. A lot of gay men feel a connection to femininity, or are accused of being feminine, or i is sometimes assumed they are feminine. It makes sense that they might be interested in exploring ideas around femininity, and that will be connected to femaleness to some extent.

I'd be interested in some sort of source for this business about lynching in blackface too. It seems odd that it keeps getting mentioned but no one can come up with any information, things became "facts" so easily on the internet.

I kind of feel like the public discussion around blackface has become kind of odd and flat over the past few years, and I'm so I'm not that crazy about using that state as the basis for talking about drag.

I wonder if the [blackface] has been used as the costume when attacking/lynching Black people is akin to the argument in this HuffPo piece?

There is no acceptable reason to ever don blackface. It’s not a joke; it isn’t funny. No claims about humor or creative license can ever make it okay. Blackface is part of a history of dehumanization, of denied citizenship, and of efforts to excuse and justify state violence. From lynchings to mass incarceration, whites have utilized blackface (and the resulting dehumanization) as part of its moral and legal justification for violence.

www.huffpost.com/entry/just-say-no-to-blackface-_b_1752139?guccounter=1

Dehumanisation, systemic abuse and lack of respect are never either moral or legal justification for violence or denying civil rights. The HuffPo piece seems like it might be misquoted and morph into something else. (I'm surprised by how this stuff happens in cuttings for years.) (I may be very wrong and would be interested in the source.)

Interesting, Arran.

I do wonder if people have, as you suggested, leapt from 'blackface is dehumanising, and dehumanisation can lead indirectly to physical attacks', to 'people attacked black people while actually wearing blackface themselves', which is something completely different.

It does matter, because while the claims may have started from an understandable and worthy desire to protect black people from further offence, they may have unintentionally morphed into a way of closing down and removing women's opportunities to accurately describe our own oppression and to draw valid forms of comparison to other forms of oppression.

That is not to say that oppression against women and against POC are identical, because that would obviously be a ridiculous claim and diminish the real histories of violence and discrimination against both women and POC, but nevertheless, without a good reason, I see no reason to avoid using the term 'womanface', given it pithily and clearly expresses the main issues around drag and more generally, around men dressing up as women.

Just as I am concerned about the erasure of the word 'woman', I am concerned about further attempts to police and erase other language used to describe women's oppression.

Goosegoot, you make some interesting points.

I agree with you that drag can be pro-women, and I think there are few GC feminists who would not applaud men exploring their own so-called feminine side (ie by wearing stereotypically feminine clothing which is denied to them as men in a patriarchal culture, such as bright, colourful clothes or make up, etc).

As above, I think the key issue is whether this is done to hit up or down, or just to expand the concept of what it is to be male.

I think the issue is that much drag is quite blatantly misogynistic. And while you might claim that is just low quality drag, it's debatable how much the misogyny is (these days at least) central to and typical of drag as a whole.

Nah I don’t buy that excuse goose. For a start it’s ignorant to suggest that gay men are more likely to be drawn to femininity any more than straight men- Nicky wire, Richie James Edwards and Kurt Cobain were all clear they were straight but liked wearing women’s clothes and make up. It’s completely ok for men to enjoy what is transitionally thought of as women’s clothing- that’s not drag. Drag uses exaggerated stereotypes like massive fake breasts, massive fake eye lashes and over the top make up and hair. Overtly sexualised clothing and ‘slutty, bitchy’ stereotypes to laugh at women. If men want to explore femininity it’s very easy to do so in ways that don’t make fun of stereotypes that make fun of women, there’s plenty ways rather than the caricature of womanhood drag portrays. Men expanding what’s ok for men is just getting on and wearing whatever they like and not making a joke of how vacuous, slutty and bitchy women are. Drag is a very specific variety of men wearing woman face and then being able to wash it off and go on enjoying their privilege and power, while we continue to be actively harmed by the stereotypes they perpetuate by suggesting this is all woman are.

I was taught in school that concentration camps were different to the death camps. Concentration camps were for locking up undesirables and their families.

I was taught that they were invented by the British in South Africa, in the Boer War, was it?

So yes I've always thought it fine to liken the locking up of refugee families with concentration camps.

Drag is a very specific variety of men wearing woman face and then being able to wash it off and go on enjoying their privilege and power, while we continue to be actively harmed by the stereotypes they perpetuate by suggesting this is all woman are

Or even by not necessarily suggesting that "this is all women are", but perpetrating certain types of portrayal, and sentiment, that are still used to demean women in everyday life, and on the street, today. Implications that women's sexuality or behaviour is 'sluttish' and somehow dirty, for example. Also the use of predominantly working class stereotypes feeds into this.

Absolutely just. Women wouldn’t see fish as an acceptable term in any other arena.

I think for me a lot of the drag apologists seem to confuse drag with men wearing women’s clothing, or even as dressing as women, when imho it’s hugely different. Someone dressing as women for Shakespeare or a spoof or rockstars in skirts isn’t about demeaning women, drag is. The obvious exaggeration points to that (massive heels, breasts, lashes, make up and clothings) as does the entire focus on women being slutty, brain dead bitches.

Do they really use the term fish???

Yikes.

I was taught in school that concentration camps were different to the death camps. Concentration camps were for locking up undesirables and their families.

This is correct. Even the Nazis built both concentration (or labour) camps and death camps. The concentration camps - places like Dachau - were mainly based in Germany, while the death camps, places like Treblinka and Sobibor were in Poland.

The death camps were exactly that. Hundreds of people (Jews, specifically) would be brought to a camp by train, told to undress and then ushered into the gas chamber en masse. People would be dead within half an hour of arrival. The reason we don't hear very much about them is that there were, for obvious reasons, very few survivors. (They were usually people who were picked out to work in the camps alongside the guards.)

In the concentration/labour camps, people (Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents and so on) were forced to work long hours and fed tiny rations. Many were shot or died of starvation or illness. Auschwitz was unusual in that it was both a concentration camp and a death camp, ie people were forced to work but some were also sent to the gas chambers. Auschwitz and the other concentration camps had survivors so we hear a lot more about what went on in them.

I agree with a lot of the comments on here, I hate the term fish but my interpretation of drag is a little different.

I've watched drag race on occasion and I think if drag men were here they would say it's about being subversive to the straight male patriarchy it isn't about laughing at women at all. The men who typically perform drag are openly gay men who themselves have faced a lot of persecution. When you hear their stories about being disowned by family etc, for them drag is about being a different self, an alter ego where they are free and accepted and celebrated by the drag community.

I think that's the underlying idea of drag but it seems that quite a lot of drag artists either actually are misogynists or not smart enough to carry it off. So that's why we end up with men insisting that it's ok to refer to women as fish, or tuna etc.

Bearded woke bloke thinks he can shut women down. Bearded woke bloke can't. And drag is woman face and it is misogynistic. Bearded woke bloke doesn't get to decide for other people. The guardian really has gone downhill if that's the low quality of writers they employ. They haven't a clue what proper journalism is. Then again, they give Owen Jones a platform too. Misogynistic shitty rag.

'for them drag is about being a different self, an alter ego where they are free and accepted and celebrated by the drag community.'

Why does this alter ego ago so often need to involve hypersexualised offensive caricatures of women's bodies and personalities though?

Being subversive to the straight male patriarchy is Nicky Wire up on stage in women’s clothing, or Kurt Cobain in a skirt, or Lou Reed singing about gay sex while wearing women’s clothes and make up despite being forced through shock treatment for being bi and being treated like a pervert and freak show by media.

Men can wear women’s clothes in all kinds of ways that don’t involve ridiculously exaggerated fake breasts, massively over sized lashes, 50 layers of make up, super high stilettos, fish net stockings on show under teeny skirts or ‘hot pants’ all while acting ‘slutty, vacuous, bitchy’ and using fish like it’s acceptable. All of these things don’t subvert the patriarchy they uphold it. Misogynistic men love that drag says fish the same way they love handmaidens screwing over women. It keeps patriarchy firmly in place with zero effort from themselves.

I don't really find the idea that someone doing well thought out comedy in drag could instead just wear a dress on stage very convincing. People like Cobain doing that aren't funny, for one thing, maybe it's worthwhile and exploring femininity, ( though I have my doubts) but it's not similar, any more than someone giving a TED talk about a topic is the same as a comedian addressing a topic.

I think it's to the point that comedians walk a very very fine line around being offensive in many cases. I can think of some nice safe comedians with shows on the CBC, and they are dead boring. When you are touching on various absurdities, which is what a man "being" a woman is, you will always be close to offending people. Of course looking at femininity through comedy will also touch on women and femaleness. I think drag also looks at maleness and masculinity actually, it's really the two together, in tension.

Male guardian 'journalist' telling people what can and can't be discussed is part of why paper is going down the crapper. I used to be a loyal reader but they can get in the bin, I used to read Prick news regularly as well

I always hated drag - especially panto, used to think it was because I didn't understand white British culture.

Tweet us unprotected now.

@RoyalCorgi and @terfsandwich

Tangential to the topic of this thread, but re your comment above:

"I was taught in school that concentration camps were different to the death camps. Concentration camps were for locking up undesirables and their families.

I was taught that they were invented by the British in South Africa, in the Boer War, was it?

So yes I've always thought it fine to liken the locking up of refugee families with concentration camps."

To respond to that, which was in response to my earlier post on this topic:

Many of my (Jewish) family members were murdered by the Nazis in WWII: I agree with AOC that it is not only acceptable but a moral duty to draw parallels between Trump's treatment of detainees in immigration/detention camps and the Nazis' treatment of Jews. As the only way to achieve Never Again is to ensure that we stop this kind of behaviour before it gets to the mass genocide stage (rather than merely bemoaning it afterwards). I have no problems with calling Trump a fascist or with highlighting similarities between his treatment of immigrants and minorities and the Nazis' treatment of Jews and other minorities.

BUT as stated above, most Jews do NOT agree with AOC's use of the term 'concentration camps' to describe the immigration/detention centres in modern-day US. This is because:

Concentration camps, as understood by most people, mean mass killing and torture centres. Most notoriously of Jews, but also of other minority groups. As RoyalCorgi writes above, the largest and most notorious concentration camp, Auschwitz, where over a million Jews were murdered, was also a concentration camp, in the sense of a slave labour camp. You can't separate killing centres from holding/slave labour centres neatly. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/concentration-camp-system-in-depth describes how from their earliest establishment in Nazi Germany, concentration camps "had always been places where the SS could kill prisoners. After the beginning of the war, however, the camps increasingly became sites for the systematic murder of individuals or small groups of persons." "Recognizing the increasing numbers of these small-scale killing operations and because they needed an efficient way to kill prisoners who had become too weak to work, the SS authorities equipped several concentration camps with gas chambers during 1941-1942." Post-1942 and with the decision to go for mass genocide of Jews, "SS and police officials established four killing centers in German-occupied Poland exclusively for this purpose", as well as the one in Auschwitz.

"Scholars have estimated that the Nazi regime incarcerated hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in the concentration camp system between 1933 and 1945. It is difficult to estimate the total number of deaths. One estimate notes a range of between 795,889 and 955,215 deaths of registered prisoners, excluding the deaths of registered Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and Lublin/Majdanek. If one counts the number of Jews (registered and unregistered) killed at Auschwitz (approximately one million) and at Lublin/Majdanek (at least 89,000), the number of deaths in the concentration camp system ranges between 1,885,889 and 2,045,215."

So in a nutshell, by the most conservative estimates, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in concentration camps by the Nazis.

To therefore use the same word for somewhere in the US that is a forced holding centre with extremely poor conditions where there have been a tiny number of deaths is therefore rather more than just linguistically inappropriate. It plays into Holocaust denial by suggesting that the camps were nothing more than holding/slave labour centres. Plus it does those in the current camps in the US no favours as it is too easy for the far right to denounce critics as liars by pointing out that there is no policy of mass murder in current US detention centres, and therefore there can be no similarity between the two.

The reality is that there are similarities between Trump's treatment of immigrants and the Nazis' treatment of Jews initially. Enforced detention, dehumanisation, lack of food and humane conditions, separation of families etc - these are all things we should be shouting about. As the example of the Nazis show where these things can lead.

But they haven't got there yet. So as I said earlier, it IS important to draw parallels and to seek to learn the lessons of history. It is ALSO important, however, to avoid over-reach with those parallels, as that risks erasing millions of dead from the historical record in favour of a trite "Gotcha", and of making those comparisons too easy to ridicule.

What Trump is doing is bad enough. We don't need to pretend that he is actually conducting mass genocide currently and it doesn't strengthen our case to pretend he is.