ABSTRACT
This chapter tackles conceptual trends pervading Anglo-American feminist scholarship on drag and questions how these trends have been shaped by their context. Certain theorists, including Janice Raymond, Marilyn Frye, and bell hooks, have expressed the notion that drag queen performance is rooted in misogyny – a notion which is interrogated in this chapter. While bell hooks provides nuanced insights into the workings of misogyny in given performances, Frye and Raymond base their analyses on the idea that drag queen performance is an exclusively gay male phenomenon, and therefore they arguably mischaracterize the artform. This chapter also examines the treatment of drag in ethnographic research, including Esther Newton’s celebrated Mother Camp. The final section of this chapter analyzes femme conceptualizations of femininity and its performance, questioning how the insights of Amy André, Sand Chang, and Julia Serano can enrich researchers’ understanding of drag performance. These three threads of the chapter work together to demonstrate the benefits of a particularizing approach to drag – one which analyzes specific scenes and performances.
