Gender Queering: Drag as Activism

Event: Dykes Do Drag @ the Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater

Some friends and I went to Dykes Do Drag a couple of weeks ago and watched several people perform gender. First of all, never had I ever...prior to about a month ago...viewed gender as being performative. However, as the night progressed we watched several people play with gender and sexuality in a variety of ways. While I have also been subjected of course to the gender binary that our society enforces, I have had moments where I wondered to myself things like, "why do females have to shave everything?" or "why can't I play with Barbies and my batman figurines. I guess I just found comfort, solace even, if that's the right word, in seeing gender being performed and exhibited in ways that "go against the grain" if you will.

The show consisted of several performers in skits, songs, and dialogues. From the little bit of knowledge I had acquired from just under a month of class, I found myself trying to analyze certain aspects of the show. In the end, I suppose I realized just how powerful of a venue drag shows and any type of gender performance can be when they are used as activist mediums. I think part of why it is powerful is because it forces people to question what they know and it really makes them think. Because in a show like Dykes Do Drag, the gender binary is drastically blurred and you often times find yourself wondering how you're going to classify a certain performer. Really, at the end of it all you just have to accept that people aren't going to fit into the categories that society has constructed. I think that is what's key in all of this, and Dykes Do Drag was especially effective in the way that it didn't allow for the categorization of it's performers beyond being able to label them as gender queer perhaps.