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Posthuman Drag

'The Reigning Queen' Out Of The Closet w/ Sasha Velour Ep. 1 | Logo

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1. 'The Reigning Queen' Out Of The Closet w/ Sasha Velour Ep. 1 | Logo
Contents of this annotation:
1. 'The Reigning Queen' Out Of The Closet w/ Sasha Velour Ep. 1 | Logo

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Objects: Extension of the drag body, Thing Power, Affect
"The notion of bodily extensions in performance offers further disruptive potential; augmentations unsettle the seemingly given, prompting new ways of seeing and thinking thebody." (154)

There is a really interesting way in which objects are involved in drag, because usually they are part of how the drag persona develops and shows themselves. Drag without objects wouldn't really be drag as we know it today: drag performers live with their accessories, their clothes, their props, their make up. Matter is fully part of a drag's persona. Indeed I think that drag uses matter as an extension of the self, of the body and of the persona. This is something I explore in the origins of the word drag, because it often implies an object itself or an object being dragged, sometimes the origin of the use drag for drag queens is believed to be from the fact that dresses would be dragging on the floor.
"drag is about materiality—about making the unreal real through cosplay. Through the use of costumes, cosmetics, and other accessories, cosplayers are able to bring to 'life' a figure that was once considered artificial or 'unreal'[50]anime, manga or gaming characters [...] Through the acts of constructing and wearing a costume, the fan constructs his or her identity in relation to fiction and enacts it.'[51] Therefore, just as drag is typically thought of as enacting a gender role, so here cosplay is about enacting a fictional character, where the costume and the player provide material form for the behaviour and narrative of the immaterial character." (5)

Drag performers are known to use matter to enhance their gendered performance. Indeed, many drag kings and queens use objects to add some socially imposed gender body traits. Thus, some drag queens use some paddings to enhance what their vision of a woman is and what vision of femininity they want to give by adding more hips, more shape, more bust and giving a Femme Realness. On the other hand, some drag kings add what they call packing, which is a penis illusion, but also fake hair . Another thing drag performers do is, sometimes, to hide the parts that has been constructed as being assigned to one gender, like breasts or the penis and testicles by using duct tape to conceal so that their performances feels more real. However some drag personas choose to not do it because they are against the idea fact that body parts are symbolizing gender whereas some performers even go as far as doing some surgery to give more credibility to their drag personas and this gives a sense of adding to the body in order to make in more

To go further into my understanding of how objects play an important role as a part of the Drag persona I want to use some examples in cosplay presented by Bainbridge and Norris which claim that the:
"'set of clothing,' functions as a suture not just between the unreal character and the real performer, but also between the real performer, the larger cosplay community, the performer and the spectator. Importantly this set of clothing is created; the authenticity of the costume very much depends on the craft that goes into its making, bringing to the fore skills in needlework and design. It sutures the cosplayer to a larger community because costumes are often created through the assistance of online forums, cosplaying sites (for example cosplay.com) and other peer communities devoted to assist in the creation and craft of costumes." (2)

Materials are fully part of the performance, they are the medium of a drag persona or a cosplayer to play with boundaries, that is what they use to express their art and to express their messages, the objects start having a certain affect and take over a part of the performance. Through make up, pieces of clothing, artifacts they try to capture a certain feeling. There is a notion of self-styling in fashion used by everyone, however performers use it to another level, to present themselves under another light, to send messages other that the emanation of one's own identity. Objects in a cosplay become part of a multi-identity that embody and play with different kinds of binaries and by the affect they transmit, gender performance through matter sometimes always gives some sense of powerfulness, this is something that according Kumbier is acquired through objects. She says that her relation with what she calls her technologies, both as a drag queen and a drag king, affect her and others.

She gives us two different examples in her text, which show how much objects are important in here relation to gender and power: "By wearing that dress, I embodied and performed my femininity in contrast to my usual gender-neutral presentation. I experienced myself as aggressively, pub- licly queer and feminine, and felt empowered that I could be both at the same time." (194) Here she chooses to showcase a part of her that she has never really shown. As a queer woman it is hard to be able to affirm your sexuality and your gender at the same time, because they are disconnected to what society expects of you. The fact that she only chose what she wanted others to see of her, presenting a single side of her identity for a night, was very important to me. It made me think of the time I went to my own prom, with a friend, who is a girl and went there expressing a masculinity that wasn't especially mine. I wish I would have had her courage to be able to show both my queerness and my masculinity, not imposing a divorce and having to choose between both of them, because accepting both would fight against prejudices against queer men: "If we can communicate this choice... in a visually accessible but complex and possibly confusing way [...] we are publicly altering the definitions of gender" (195). Objects help us by their affect to communicate a message that would be hard to communicate on her own, and to challenge actual binaries in society. This is something that is explored in Bennet's Vibrant Matter: "Thing power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle" (6). Kumbier talks a lot about the other affects of her tools on the performer and on the audience, she says that she uses tools that are inherent to the straight female identity imposed on women in a different way to advocate for queerness in femininity: "Instead, these performances were about taking that standard and challenging it, so that the same combination of tools (lipstick, mascara, nylons, lingerie) would produce wildly different results." (195).

One of the most interesting part of her essay is when she talks about her relation to phallic objects and the power that is attributed to them by associating them to masculinity can empower a woman who performs as a drag king or that is fan of a drag king: "because for the drag king fan, the possibility of desiring and owning that phallus, that masculine energy (carnal or otherwise) is much more real. Watching women perform convincingly as men, working their dicks and getting tips stuffed in their pants by adoring audience members, fe- male fans are empowered with the knowledge that (with practice and some technological assistance) we, too, can posses that dick, can be- come the performing subjects of our desire" (197-8). It gives the power to someone that has always been oppressed by patriarchy, even in the world of drag, to go against it, to mock it and to have the sense that they are living it. A simple filled sock between their legs or a dildo can help someone feel really powerful because they feel as if they are part of the dominant group for a moment, they feel as entitled as someone from the dominant group and they confuse people and go against gender norms.
Human Drag: Performances that challenge of Gender, Family and Realness Drag as I would like to use it during my project is a certain performance of gender that is used to criticize the current world dynamic. It is a form of art , that often uses a certain form of stereotypical performance, nowadays more known as a performance of gender. I think it breaches the barriers that we have put over gender and the construct around it:
"gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede; rather, it is an identity tenuouslyconstituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylizedrepetitionofacts. Further,gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be under-stood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self." (519)

If a repetition self-styling acts are to define drag personas certainly plays with that going back and forth between the on-stage performance and their life in which they are usually another person, blurring the lines of gender, or using the performance to criticize the current status quo of what someone of a certain gender should be like. Butler considers gender as a "corporeal style [...] which is both intentional and performative" (521). She distinguishes being a female and a woman. The former would have no meaning as it only refers to sex and the ladder would include a sense of becoming. She has a particular vision of the body and sees as something that is gendered by the will and the surroundings of the 'owner' of the body. Would drag be an art form, then, by being an act of gender if everyone performs their gender and that every act is not individual but collective in some way:
"gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. The complex components that go into an act must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of acting in concert and acting in accord which acting one's gender invariably is." (526)

Is drag performance useless then? If everyone is acting? I don't think so because according to me drag 'mocks' in a certain way these gender performances that are imposed unto us by society, our family, our experiences and try to challenge the rules that are input on gender performance. A very interesting point that Butler makes is that drag is accepted in certain kinds of ways only, during a show or when people expect to see it whereas it is more criticized in public:

"theatrical performances can meet with political censorship and scathing criticism, gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions. Indeed, the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence. [...] In the theatre, one can say, 'this is just an act,' and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction, one can maintain one's sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions which announce that 'this is only a play' allows strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life." (527)

This goes to show that other challenging gender binaries, transvestism (which is a part of drag, but I want to make sure I distinguish it because I don't want to reduce the art of drag to transvestism) also "challenges [...] the distinction between appearance and reality" (527). Indeed if gender is nothing but a performance it is real only as any performance is. Is gender false as a performance then? Maybe not because it is so inherent to our societies that even if gender is completely a construct, the reactions that we get from our surroundings make it very real and something that you need to apply to: "Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all." (528).

Challenging the hierarchy and the status quo is always something dangerous in a society because it usually is responded to by punishments. I think drag is about not being scared of these punishments and even denouncing them, making them heard through art that uses your body. I think this challenging of realness is really important to the rest of my project because challenging reality is a good way to face oppression: "Realness category allows poor, gay, often black or latino men to untangle for a moment the economic and social forms of oppression that stand between them and the so-called 'real world.'" (6) To perform sometimes certain kinds of Realness makes rejected people be part of a world that doesn't accept them by performing people that are integrated and that have a 'good' place in society. That is something that can be found in cosplay too even more than in drag, an intersection of identities: "Cosplay demonstrates that these signs, while all relating to aspects of identity, are not just signs of gender but also race (being Japanese) and reality (being unreal). In this way cosplay extends the possibilities for drag beyond gendered roles of kings and queens, to playing at being Japanese and playing at being unreal." (4)

Human Drag challenges more than only gender norms and realness, I think it challenges other components of our Western society, the concept of the nuclear family because they create new bonds, new relationships and use the terms for family to reconstruct a sense of family. This is something that is used, I think, mainly because in the LGBTQ+ community people are often rejected from their family because they are different from their kin's expectations. Indeed, heteronormativity in families is still something that is really present, because that is what is expected first. Sometimes when you comet to your kin, it doesn't happen well, they don't accept you and they don't want you to be too "queer" around them if they still tolerate you, a need to create a new family emerges: "Additionally, creating social bonds is often declared an important goal in the program, with RuPaul considering all participants their “children”. As Asia O’hara describes in season 10, “You are creating family outside your blood family”. Lastly I would say that drag gives power to the ones who perform it over how they want to express themselves which is not something that is given a lot out of a performance.