Girls Who Think Like Boys Who Act Like Girls

                Girls Who Think Like Boys Who Act Like Girls

                Tags: Male Drag History, FTF, gender performance

                It was Valentine’s Day at the Highline Ballroom, exactly one year after my debut as an aspiring anthropologist on the New York burlesque scene. Didn’t I feel so cool, drink in one hand, notebook in the other, talking to other people in the full audience at Filthy Gorgeous Burlesque and explaining what I was doing there that night. I could go on and on about the show, which I want to say was one of the great ones I have seen through and through. Madame Rosebud was kind enough to invite me out to see all the goodies that night. From the opening “hot jazz, dixieland, French chanson and gutbucket blues” numbers belted out by the beautiful 5 man, 1 woman band The Hot Sardines, to BB Heart’s hilariously sexy rabbit mask number, to GoGo Harder’s tireless performance of “Cherry Bomb,” this most pseudo-romantic holiday night was made sexy through and through. Hosting that evening was none other than the World Famous *BOB*, as wonderfully unapologetic as ever. One thing she said particularly caught my ears. She was introducing Madame Rosebud to the stage, who she called her “gaybie,” her gay baby drag queen. I couldn’t help but smile, thinking that surely few if anyone in the audience would get it. Clearly Madame Rosebud and World Famous *BOB* are women, how could they be in drag?

                The lack of understanding shines an immediate light on the state of gender notions in contemporary society. Men can be in drag as women, check. Women can be in drag as men, check. But the idea of a woman in drag as a woman, falls on deaf if not skeptical if not scornful ears. A coworker of mine expressed this view quite clearly. When I explained my project to her and mentioned FTF, she frowned and said, “I don’t buy it.” She then added, “I like me some Judith Butler (a pioneering champion of the theory of gender performativity and basic read for anyone in the field of gender studies), but [she] just sounds kinky.” That isn’t to say that identifying as an MTF or FTM transperson, or dressing as a member of the opposite sex is all fair game and totally acceptable. Even though gay bar raids are largely a thing of the past around here, there is still plenty of old-fashioned hate and ignorance to go around; but certainly there are a great deal of people in New York who recognize that, yes, these things are real, and they happen, and they’re alright, especially when we compare the populace of today to that of the 1960s and ‘70s, the period which Esther Newton documents in Mother Camp. Her book serves as an important documentation of male drag subculture in American cities during that time, when gay men in drag began asserting themselves as a group which, contrary to being some sort of moral aberration to be suppressed, beat down, and arrested, could and would fight back, and would lead their lives as they saw fit. The men and the culture she documents serve as an interesting contrast to what appears today to be a new wave of hyper-masculine gay men, with their bulging biceps and crew cuts, looking nothing like the “fairies” who were instrumental in sparking the LGBT movements which as a concomitant effect of Stonewall. These were the men who, skinny, wigged, and probably in heels, finally stood up for their way of life.  

                What is also important is that they played a game with society every time they got into drag. With every make-up application, with every cross outfit, with every wig, there was a sort of dare: I bet you you’ll see a woman.

                To this day there remains a majority of people who aren’t ready for the idea that everyday gender is indeed performed, albeit in the mode of contrivances which are so deeply and widely ingrained in us that we never think about them. (Even Newton mentions female performances of femininity in a mere footnote [Mother Camp]). That does not make them passive, nor does it make them natural; it just makes them semi-automatic. As women, we go through the motions with our daily beauty rituals, fixing this, covering that, making these perky, making that smaller. And hey, why not? My point is not that we should not make our skin dewy, or flawless, or whatever; or that we shouldn’t go to great lengths to make our legs look long and lean. But the power to dazzle is not wholly invested in us from some divine and faceless source; we learn it from our mothers, from our girlfriends, from magazines, from good old-fashioned trial and error, from that drop-dead gorgeous girl who everyone stares at on the subway. In response to her statement, I had asked my coworker that night, sort of provocatively, “So you think the fact that we are wearing heels is somehow natural?” “Yeah, sort of,” she said with moderate confidence, suggesting that some female fashion sensibility is a manifestation of something innate. A woman I know cannot leave the house without putting on lipstick. Yet she, in contrast to my coworker, kind of laughed at herself for this. “...then I feel like ‘now I’m okay with myself, and I’m ready to go out into the world as a woman.”

                We could sit around debating the timeless, tiresome questions: Who’s responsible for ideals of femininity, is the female form to be covered or displayed, are heels and mascara oppressing women, is the naked female form a cause for shame or admiration, will women ever escape the objectifying (?) effects of the male gaze, and so on, and so on. My guess is that your convictions will probably reveal more about the way of life you have or wish to adopt, than it will about some sort of absolute and universal truth.

                Nonetheless, my conviction is that gender is itself a performance, the world a stage (I think somebody important said that before ;)). Be it on the street, on the subway, at a drag ball or on the burlesque stage, we all put on a show. What we are trying to say – with our bodies, our movements, our clothes, postures, make-up, mannerisms – is as varied as our imaginations can carry us, such that the very idea of “being female” or “being male” is rendered quite meaningless.

                Of course, certain environments allow for different appropriations of what it means to “be” a gender. New York City is going to have more to show in terms of variations on gender and sexuality than, say, a small mid-Western town or a posh suburb. That is not to say that these variations exist more in one and less in another; I want to suggest that variations abound everywhere, but their actual manifestation becomes repressed and they often slip into the darker spaces of the human imagination, in that fancy little region which people call “taboo” at best, “deviance” or even “illness” at worst. These “places” in which stigma is generated and systematically applied to those activities which, for whatever reason, do not fit into the majority* ideal of what is good and acceptable, exist primarily in the collective mind, are circulated and upheld by individuals who become, for lack of a better term, infected by tyrannical morality. If the categories of taboo, deviance, and aberration are created and upheld socially, so, too, are their counterparts. Those activities, behaviors, and mannerisms which are deemed acceptable, good, right, and/or healthy, though they appear to be enacted and embodied on an individual level, are made meaningful in a social setting. Gender is a performance, with actors, actresses, and a scrutinizing audience ever-present, constantly negotiating meaning.

                Burlesque makes this process very apparent. That night at the Highline Ballroom, Madame Rosebud and World Famous *BOB* did something that, I believe, would not make sense to a lot of people. They made a familiar bet with the audience: I bet you you’ll see a woman. They, like men in drag, are acutely aware of the fact that they are putting on a show just by doing those things which are often just regarded as “female.” The response is something like confusion, dismissal: Well, duh, you are women. This represents a failure to recognize that gender is itself a performance.