drag (clothing) - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Drag (clothing)From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Drag is used for any clothing carrying symbolic significance but usually referring to the clothing associatedwith one gender role when worn by a person of another gender. The origins of the word are debated, but"drag" has appeared in print as early as 1870.[1] One suggested etymological root is 19th-century theatreslang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor.[2]

"Drag queen" appeared in print at least as early as 1941.[1] The verb is to "do drag". A folk etymologywhose acronym basis reveals the late-20th-century bias, would make "drag" an abbreviation of "dressed asgirl" in description of male transvestism. The opposite, "drab" for "dressed as boy", is unrecorded. Drag maybe practiced by people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

Contents1 Drag in the performing arts

1.1 Theatre1.1.1 In folk custom

1.2 Opera1.3 Film and television1.4 Music

2 Drag kings and queens3 See also4 References5 Further reading

Drag in the performing artsThere is a long history of drag in the performing arts, spanning a wide range of cultural as well as artistictraditions.

Drag in the theatre arts manifests two kinds of phenomenon. One is cross-dressing in the performance,which is part of the social history of theatre. The other is cross-dressing within the theatrical fiction (i.e. thecharacter is a cross-dresser), which is part of literary history.

Drag is often played for comic effect. Examples include the female characters (at times caricatures) playedby male members of Monty Python, and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. In other casesthe comedy may be primarily in the material being performed, and not necessarily in the fact that the womencharacters are portrayed by men, such as in many Kids in the Hall sketches.

Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement was keen on amateur theatricals, from Charterhouse publicschool where among other roles he played female operatic roles. In the army he made a speciality of femaleroles and would often make his own dresses. His stage speciality was what he called his skirt dance.[3]

Theatre

Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are widespread cultural phenomena. In England, actors inShakespearean plays, and all Elizabethan theatre, were all male; female parts were played by young men in

Drag (clothing) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(clothing)

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drag. Shakespeare used the conventions to enrich the gender confusions of As You Like It, and Ben Jonsonmanipulated the same conventions in Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, (1609). The plot device of the filmShakespeare in Love (1998) turns upon this Elizabethan convention. During the reign of Charles II the ruleswere relaxed to allow women to play female roles on the London stage, reflecting the French fashion, andthe convention of men routinely playing female roles consequently disappeared. However, in current-dayBritish pantomime the Pantomime dame is a traditional role played by a man in drag, while the Principalboy, such as Prince Charming or Dick Whittington, is played by a girl.

Within the dramatic fiction, a double standard historically affected the uses of drag. In male-dominatedsocieties where active roles were reserved to men, a woman might dress as a man under the pressures of herdramatic predicament. In these societies a man's position was above a woman's, causing a rising action thatsuited itself to tragedy, sentimental melodrama and comedies of manners that involved confused identities.A man dressed as a woman was thought to be a falling action only suited to broad low comedy andburlesque. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are an all male ballet troupe where much of the humor isin seeing male dancers en travesti; performing roles usually reserved to females, wearing tutus and dancingen pointe with considerable technical skill.

These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigidgender roles were undermined and began to dissolve. This evolution changed drag in the last decades of the20th century. Among contemporary drag performers, the theatrical drag queen or street queen may at timesbe seen less as a "female impersonator" per se, but simply as a drag queen, and the role of the queen existingas an identity based in neither mainstream male nor mainstream female conventions. Examples include TheCockettes, Danny La Rue or RuPaul.

In folk custom

Men dressed or disguised as women have featured in traditional customs and rituals for centuries. Forexample, the characters of some regional variants of the traditional mummers play, which were traditionallyalways performed by men, include Besom Bet(ty); numerous variations on Bessy or Betsy; Bucksome Nell;Mrs Clagdarse; Dame Dolly; Dame Dorothy; Mrs Finney; Mrs Frail and many others.[4] The variantperformed around Plough Monday in Eastern England is known as the Plough Play[5] (also Wooing Play orBridal Play)[6] and usually involves two female characters, the young "Lady Bright and Gay" and "OldDame Jane" and a dispute about a bastard child.[7]

A character called Bessy also accompanied the Plough Jags (aka Plough Jacks, Plough Stots, PloughBullocks, etc.) even in places where no play was performed: "she" was a man dressed in women's clothes,who carried a collecting box[5] for money and other largesse.

"Maid Marian" of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is played by a man, and the Maid Marians referred to inold documents as having taken part in May Games and other festivals with Morris dancers would mostprobably also have been men. The "consort" of the Castleton Garland King was traditionally a man (until1956, when a woman took over the role) and was originally simply referred to as "The Woman".[8]

Opera

In Baroque opera, where soprano roles for men were sung by castrati, Handel's heroine Bradamante, in theopera Alcina, disguises herself as a man to save her lover, played by a male soprano: contemporaryaudiences were not the least confused. In Romantic opera, certain roles of young boys were written for altoand soprano voices and acted by women en travestie (in English, in "trouser roles").[9] The most familiartrouser role in pre-Romantic opera is Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (1786). Romantic operacontinued the convention: there are trouser roles for women in drag in Rossini's Semiramide (Arsace),Donizetti's Rosamonda d'Inghilterra and Anna Bolena, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, even a page in Verdi's


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Don Carlo. The convention was beginning to die out with Siebel, the ingenuous youth in Charles Gounod'sFaust (1859) and the gypsy boy Beppe in Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, so that Offenbach gave the role ofCupid to a real boy in Orphée aux Enfers. But Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in tights, giving Frenchaudiences a glimpse of Leg (the other in fact being a prosthesis) and Prince Orlovsky, who gives the ball inDie Fledermaus, is a mezzo-soprano, to somewhat androgynous effect. The use of travesti in RichardStrauss's Rosenkavalier (1912) is a special case, unusually subtle and evocative of its 18th-century setting,and should be discussed in detail at Der Rosenkavalier.

Film and television

The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas' Charley's Aunt (London, 1892) werestill viable theatre material in La Cage aux Folles 1978, (remade, as The Birdcage, as late as 1996). In the1890s the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions (notably Hasty Pudding Theatricals atHarvard College, annually since 1891 and at other Ivy League schools like Princeton University's TriangleClub or the University of Pennsylvania's Mask and Wig Club) were permissible fare to the samemiddle-class American audiences that were scandalized to hear that in New York City, rouged young men inskirts were standing on tables to dance the Can-Can in Bowery dives like The Slide. Drag shows werepopular night club entertainment in New York in the 20s, then were forced underground, until the "JewelBox Revue" played Harlem's Apollo Theater in the 1950s: "49 men and a girl." The girl received a roar ofapplause, when she was revealed as the same smart young man in dinner clothes who had been introducingeach of the evening's acts. Drag as a last-resort tactic in situational farce (its only permissible format at thetime) made a big Hollywood splash in Some Like It Hot (1959).

For the San Francisco drag troupe, The Cockettes (1970–72), who performed with glitter eyeshadow andgilded mustaches and beards, the term "genderfuck" was coined. Drag broke out from underground theatrein the persona of Divine in John Waters's Pink Flamingos (1972): see also Charles Pierce. The crowdsurrounding Andy Warhol's Factory scene of the 1960s–1980s also included some drag queens whoachieved a certain amount of fame, such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, both immortalized in theLou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side". The cult hit movie musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show hasinspired several generations of young people to attend performances in drag, although many of these fanswould deny that they are actually transvestites.

On American network television, only the broadest slapstick drag tradition was generally represented. FewAmerican TV comedians consistently used drag as a comedy device, among them Milton Berle, Flip Wilsonand Martin Lawrence, although drag characters have occasionally been popular on sketch TV shows like InLiving Color (with Jim Carrey's grotesque female bodybuilder) and Saturday Night Live (with the Gap Girls,among others). On the popular 1960s military sitcom, McHale's Navy, Ensign Parker (Tim Conway)sometimes had to dress in drag (often with hilarious results) whenever McHale and/or his crew had todisguise themselves in order to carry out their elaborate schemes. Gilligan's Island occasionally featuresmen dressing in women's clothes, although this was not considered drag since it wasn't for a performance.The popular Canadian comedy group The Kids in the Hall also used drag in many of their skits. Dame Edna,the drag persona of Australian actor Barry Humphries, is the host of several specials, including the DameEdna Experience. Dame Edna also tours internationally, playing to sell-out crowds, and has appeared onTV's Ally McBeal.

Dame Edna represents an anomalous example of the drag concept. Her earliest incarnation wasunmistakably a man dressed (badly) as a suburban housewife. Edna's manner and appearance became sofeminised and glamorised that even some of her TV show guests appear not to see that the Edna character isplayed by a man. The furor surrounding Dame Edna's "advice" column in Vanity Fair magazine suggeststhat one of her harshest critics, actress Salma Hayek, was unaware Dame Edna was a female characterplayed by a man.

In England, drag has been more common in comedy: Benny Hill portrayed several female characters, the


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Monty Python troupe and The League of Gentlemen often played female parts in their skits. The League ofGentlemen are also credited with the first ever portrayal of "nude drag", where a man playing a femalecharacter is shown naked but still with the appropriate female anatomy, like fake breasts and a merkin.Alastair Sim plays the headmistress Miss Millicent Fritton in The Belles of St Trinian's (1954) and BlueMurder at St Trinian's (1957). He played the role straight. No direct joke about the actor's true gender ismade. However, she is quite non-feminine in her pursuits of betting, drinking and smoking. Her schoolsends out girls into a merciless world where it is the world that need beware.

These characters are played straight(ish). Within the conceit of the sketch/film, they are women, it is we thatare in on the joke. Monty Python women, whom the troupe called pepperpots, are random middle-agedworking/lower middle class typically wearing long brown coats that were common in the 1960s. Save for afew characters played by Eric Idle, they looked and sounded very little like actual women with theircaricatural outfits and shrill falsettos. When a sketch called for a "real" woman the Pythons called on CarolCleveland.

The joke is reversed in Life of Brian where "they" are pretending to be men, including obviously falsebeards, so that they can go to the stoning. When someone throws the first stone too early the Pharisee asks"who threw that", and they answer "she did, she did,..." in high voices. "Are there any women here today?"he says, "No no no" they say in gruff voices.

Kenny Everett dragged up in his TV show as an OTT screen star called Cupid Stunt. Kenny was particularlyunconvincing as a woman because he had a beard to which a lot of flesh-tone makeup was applied. Howevershe says "all in the best possible taste" as she exposed her knickers as she re-crossed her legs. She is in moreof the Dame Edna genre.

David Walliams and (especially) Matt Lucas often play female roles in the British television comedy LittleBritain. Walliams also notably plays the part of Emily Howard – a "rubbish transvestite", who makes anunconvincing woman.

Maximilliana and RuPaul co-star together in the TV show Nash Bridges starring Don Johnson and CheechMarin during the two-part episode "Cuda Grace". Maximilliana looking passable, leads one of theinvestigators to believe she is "real" and sexually advances only to learn there is something extra downthere, greatly to his dismay.

Music

The world of popular music has a venerable history of drag. Marlene Dietrich was a popular actress andsinger who sometimes performed dressed as a man, such as in the films Blue Angel and Morocco. In theglam rock era many male performers (such as David Bowie and The New York Dolls) donned partial or fulldrag. This tradition waned somewhat in the late 1970s but was revived in the new wave era of the 1980s, aspop singers Boy George (of Culture Club), Pete Burns (of Dead or Alive), and Philip Oakey (of The HumanLeague), frequently appeared in a sort of semi-drag, while female musicians of the era dabbled in their ownform of androgyny, with performers like Annie Lennox, Phranc and The Bloods sometimes performing asdrag kings. The male grunge musicians of the 1990s sometimes performed wearing deliberately ugly drag –that is, wearing dresses but making no attempt to look feminine, not wearing makeup and often not evenshaving their beards. (Nirvana did this several times, notably in the In Bloom video.) However, possibly themost famous drag artist in music in the 1990s was RuPaul. In Japan there are several musicians in the visualkei scene, such as Mana (Moi dix Mois and Malice Mizer), Kaya (Schwarz Stein), Hizaki and Jasmine You(both Versailles), who always or usually appear in full or semi-drag. Maximilliana worked with RuPual inthe Nash Bridges episode "Cuda Grace" and was a regular at the now defunct Queen Mary Show Lounge inStudio City, California until the very end. Max (short for Maximilliana) is most well known for herperformance as Charlie/Claire in Ringmaster: the Jerry Springer Movie. Max has also appeared in othermovies including Shoot or Be Shot and 10 Attitudes as well as on television shows including: Nash Bridges,Clueless, Gilmore Girls, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Mas Vale Tarde with Alex Cambert, MadTV, The


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Tyra Banks Show, The Tom Joyner Show, America's Got Talent and much more. As of November 11, 2011Maximilliana released her first album of all original, fun, dance music for the LGBT community and isavailable on iTunes, Amazon.com and CdBaby.

Drag kings and queensFurther information: Drag king, Drag queen and Faux queen

In gay slang, a "queen" is an effeminate gay man, or a gay man with a specializied quality (e.g. "rice queen",for a non-Asian gay man who prefers Asian men; "snow queen" for a non-caucasian man who likescaucasian men; and "bean queen", for a gay man who prefers Hispanic men). Along with "drag", the term"drag queen" has entered the general lexicon.

Drag queens (first use in print, 1941) are stereotypically viewed to be gay men that dress in drag, either aspart of a performance or for personal fulfillment. Though a good portion who wear women's clothing arestraight men, the term drag queen distinguishes them from transvestites, transsexuals or transgender people.Doing drag here often includes wearing dramatically heavy makeup, wigs and prosthetic devices as part ofthe costume. Females are called drag kings; however, drag king also has a much wider range of meanings.It is currently most often used to describe entertainment (singing or lip-synching) in which there is nonecessarily firm correlation between a performer's deliberately macho onstage persona and offstage genderidentity or sexual orientation, just as cis males who do female drag for the stage may or may not identify asbeing either gay or female in personal identity. A faux queen is usually a woman doing traditional femaledrag in the same spirit as men have done.

See alsoList of transgender-related topicsTravesti (theatre)

ReferencesOxford English Dictionary 2012 (Online version of1989 2nd. Edition) Accessed 11 April

1.

[1] (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=drag) Online EtymologyDictionary: Drag

2.

http://zagria.blogspot.mx/2007/12/something-about-scouts-1.html

3.

Master Mummers website: Character Name Indexto Folk Play Scripts, Compiled by Peter Millington(http://www.folkplay.info/Texts/CastIndex_.htm)Accessed 1 Dec 2011

4.

Hole, Christina (1978). A Dictionary of British FolkCustoms, p238, Paladin Granada, ISBN0-586-08293-X

5.

Folkplay Info: Bibliography of NottinghamshireFolk Plays & Related Customs, E.C.Cawte et al(1967) (http://www.folkplay.info/Notts/Td00023.htm) Accessed 1 Dec 2011

6.

Folkplay Info: Cropwell, Notts. Ploughboys' Play -1890, Chaworth Musters (1890)(http://www.folkplay.info/Texts/89sk63cm.htm)Accessed 1 Dec 2011

7.

Hole, Christina (1978). A Dictionary of British FolkCustoms, p114, Paladin Granada, ISBN0-586-08293-X "Until 1956, 'she' was always a manin female dress, veiled and riding side-saddle – theMan-Woman of tradition."

8.

Web search (http://www.bohemianopera.com/roles_af.htm)

9.

Further readingPadva, Gilad (2000). "Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture". Journal ofCommunication Inquiry 24 (2): 216–243. doi:10.1177/0196859900024002007 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2F0196859900024002007).


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