ABSTRACT
I’ve had a growing obsession with drag queens lately. Their artistry. The pageantry. Their culture and sub-cultures. But what I find most endearing is the thin veil between identities of male and female, and the vulnerability that brings these ladies onto their stage. As Ibrahim reminds us, “representation is now turned into a discourse, which constructs how we ‘see’ and ‘define’ objects, how we relate to these objects, and how we make them meaningful or meaningless.” We see the drag queen now as a cultural object—a part of our troubled narratives of gender, sexuality, performativity, and art. We see them as larger-than-life ladies who can make us laugh but who also push our normative sensibilities with every strut, sashay, and shake. Yet in this art are masked men with the courage to shatter the codes of gender representation that many of us take as truth––a concealed form of power (Foucault, 1980).
