Drag: Etymology, Use and Meaning
The word drag can be used either a a verb or a noun. As a verb it usually meant to draw, to pull. There was a sense of attraction, of dragging something or someone to oneself or on the ground, to draw. Another meaning could be "'to take a puff' on a cigarette". It is interesting for me that every use of the verb involves something or someone else, even in the terms like drag-out which means a violent fight, there is a concept that you need an other involved, and often this other involved is an object or part of a body 'to drag one's feet'. There is a theory involving the idea that drag comes from the fact that it was about objects dragging in the floor which is very interesting because this would give an object its own agency and attributed to the Object.
As a noun we can trace the origins of drag back to "dragnet", used in 1300 as a grapnel, which is literally an object used to drag other things, so it is an object performing the action of dragging. It would again be possible to decenter the human from the action and see the object as a performer, even though it is a play with words and language that was created by humans for humans and is therefore anthropocentric and humanist in and out of itself.
Drag, in talking about gender performance and crossdressing, has first been used in the end of the 19th century in theatres to talk about men wearing women's clothes because women couldn't be actresses at the time so men would usually play women's roles. It is believed, as it is said in the video, that it comes from how dresses would drag on the floor. This puts, again the object as a agent and as the originator of the word which I think is a really interesting point of view to take for the rest of my project. Drag as in drag queen however has been used for the first time around 1940s. Drag as in drag race has started being used around the same time, drag here is believed to be slang for automobile because in the time wagons would be dragged by horses. This is now used as a pun in RuPaul's Drag Race, which has made drag queens part of the mainstream culture in the West and especially in North America.
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 then be an art form 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.
