12/6/2023 0 Comments Judith butler dragAs in Robin Williams’ cross-dressing performance as a nanny in Mrs. As a consequence, not all drag performances function as previously stated. However, while drag performers have some control over the way that their gender identity is perceived and interpreted by their audience, it is ultimately the audience members who inscribe their notions of gender onto the performers. For the most subversive performances of drag, there are no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity is revealed as a regulatory fiction just as Butler claims. Secondly, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” If gender is a fluid process of repetition, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do. To Butler, drag consists of two functions: firstly, to reveal the possibility of non-judgemental pluralism when it comes to gender expression and identity. This will prove to be important in the following analysis of drag, a performance that does well in destabilizing the gender binary and exposing the fictional construction of gender. As Elin Diamond states in Performance and Cultural Politics, “each performance marks out a unique temporal space… contain traces of other now-absent performances, other now disappeared scenes.” Thus, gender always exists as a fluid and contested space where meanings and desires are generated, occluded, and multiply interpreted depending on culture and historical context. Since gender is constructed differently across time and space, the performing of gender does not focus on completed forms. I assert that this is both the source of performativity’s liberatory power, and its greatest liability in effecting progressive cultural change. However, Butler’s writing encourages us to think about the ways that the “doing” of gender is not merely a performance that one has control over, as in taking on a role, but also one that is unfolding in accordance with already socially inscribed performatives. Performative acts can be broken down into two parts: a thing doing and a thing done. Butler adopts the idea by the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,” highlighting that gender is constructed through repetition it is formed entirely of acts, both past and present, which constitute its reality. Far from avoiding the political capabilities of drag, this thesis ultimately proposes that in viewing drag as an artistic medium first, the ensuing political and social analysis becomes all the more abundant.To begin our analysis, it is necessary that we define performativity and discern what it means for gender to be performative. Marks to observe the confluence of film and drag form in the work of Sin Wai Kin. Lastly, I examine the nature of narrative and temporality through the lens of worldbuilding, turning to the ideas of Elizabeth Freeman, José Esteban Muñoz, and Laura U. I then turn to the concept of genre, using film and queer theory to explore the layers of drag and masquerade in Pedro Almodóvar’s queering of the melodramatic genre. Exploring the importance of gesture in drag and cinema, I turn to the theories Laura Mulvey and Giorgio Agamben for a re-assessment of drag and movement in the documentary Paris is Burning (1990). Within the hybrid and fluid space of what I term cinematic drag, I explore the works of particular drag artists, performers, and queer filmmakers through the formal schemas of gesture, genre, and worldbuilding. As a means of demonstrating the viability of such an approach, this thesis explores drag’s relationship with the cinematic medium through overlapping forms, theories, and histories. My investigation of drag explores the multivalence of form and medium in drag, building on the frameworks of theorists such as Caroline Levine and Renate Lorenz, arguing that this approach enables an assessment of drag as a layered, multivalent, and hybrid set of practices that collide and overlap with the formal logics and affordances of other mediums. In arguing that Butlerian theory has had deleterious effects on artistic research of the medium, leading to reductive analyses that approach artists and performers through the false binary of resistance and assimilation, this project instead proposes a methodology predicated on viewing drag primarily through the lens of formal analysis and visual and cultural media theory. This thesis explores the medium of drag performance, aiming to bypass the omnipresence of Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity.
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