A critical exploration of cross-dressing and drag in gender performance and camp in contemporary North American drama and film

Abstract

My thesis focuses on drag as a major component of camp in relation to gender performance. My position on drag for the purposes of this thesis is that drag's function within camp is about challenging and disrupting normative notions of gender and sexuality. I examine how cross-dressing located in sexual difference and imbricated by models of expressivity has complicated the perceived potential for drag and camp to challenge normative notions of gender and sexuality. ' Chapter one' shows how performance metaphors for gender located in the act of cross-dressing reinscribe traditional notions of personhood. ' Chapter two' shows that drag moves off the binaries of man and woman, and sexual difference located in cross-dressing, by using the norms associated with sexual difference and mandatory heterosexuality to resist the norms. This moves cross-dressing into the realm of drag and gender play. I use two Hollywood films to illustrate that while cross-dressing is incorporated into drag and gender play, crossdressing alone does not signal drag. Likewise camp uses parody, but parody alone is not camp. 'Chapter three' explores notions of "identity" and the need to open up certain theoretical discourses, specifically feminist and lesbian theoretical discourses, which are still bound to conventional notions about camp, to critical revision. hi this chapter The Greater Toronto Drag King Society's performances illustrate camp's potential to articulate genders and sexualities beyond the traditional binaries. 'Chapter four' moves into the possibilities for the proliferation of identities in drag and camp. Drag is theorized as "cross-species-dressing" in examples where animals, people and machines are entangled in complex hybrid relationships which explode notions of the organic dimensions of body as self. The cyborg is a fascinating but until now unexplored application in which to consider "couplings" which undo normative notions of gender and sexuality in drag and camp.