ABSTRACT
“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola,” the Kinks sang in 1970, asserting that the gay man in drag was the only sane person in a crazy world. 1 That rock group's revaluation of camp and the masquerade is currently shared by many theorists on the left, who advocate it as a postmodern strategy for the subversion of phallogocentric identities and desires. Their now radical chic has made the likes of Dolly Parton and Madonna (and their satin queen or Wanna-Be parodies or imitations) more than chicks with cheek; they have become draped crusaders for the social constructionist cause, catching gender in the act—as an act—so as to demonstrate there is no natural, essential, biological basis to gender identity or sexual orientation. Female impersonation in particular has been theorized as progressive, partly because of the long-standing link between femininity and masquerade in psychoanalysis (going back to Joan Riviere's 1929 essay, “Womanliness as a Masquerade”), and partly because femininity, unlike masculinity, is thought to involve non-phallogocentric ways of relating to the body, to language, to desire, and to others. 2
