Drag (entertainment)
Drag is a performance of exaggerated femininity, masculinity, or other forms of gender expression, usually for entertainment purposes. Drag usually involves cross-dressing. A drag queen is someone who performs femininely and a drag king is someone who performs masculinely. Performances often involve comedy, music, social satire, and at times political commentary. The term may be used as a noun as in the expression in drag or as an adjective as in drag show.
Etymology
The origin of the term drag is uncertain; it may date as far back as the Elizabethan era in England, where it was used to describe male actors playing female roles in theaters where cross-dressing was the norm. The first recorded use of drag in reference to actors dressed in women's clothing is from 1870. One suggested etymological root is 19th-century theater slang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor. Another possible origin is the Yiddish term trogn meaning "to wear", from the German tragen. It may also have been based on the term grand rag, which was historically used for a masquerade ball.In folk custom
Men dressed as women have been featured in certain traditional customs for centuries. For example, the characters of some regional variants of the traditional mummers' play, which were traditionally always performed by men, include Besom Bet; numerous variations on Bessy or Betsy; Bucksome Nell; Mrs Clagdarse; Dame Dolly; Dame Dorothy; Mrs Finney; Mrs Frail; and many others.The variant performed around Plough Monday in Eastern England is known as the Plough Play and usually involves two female characters, the young "Lady Bright and Gay" and "Old Dame Jane" and a dispute about a bastard child. A character called Bessy also accompanied the Plough Jags even in places where no play was performed: "she" was a man dressed in women's clothes, who carried a collecting box for money and other largesse.
"Maid Marian" of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is played by a man, and the Maid Marians referred to in old documents as having taken part in May Games and other festivals with Morris dancers would most probably also have been men. The "consort" of the Castleton Garland King was traditionally a man and was originally simply referred to as "The Woman".
Theatre
Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are a widespread and longstanding cultural phenomena.The ancient Roman playwright Plautus' Menaechmi includes a scene in which Menaechmus I puts on his wife's dress, then wears a cloak over it, intending to remove the dress from the house and deliver it to his mistress. Menaechmus says: "Look at me. Do I look the part?" Peniculus responds: "What in the world have you got on?" Menaechmus says: "Tell me I am gorgeous."
In England, actors in Shakespearean plays, and all Elizabethan theatre, were all male; female parts were played by young men in drag because women were banned from performing publicly. Shakespeare used the conventions to enrich the gender confusions of As You Like It, and Ben Jonson manipulated the same conventions in Epicœne, or The Silent Woman. During the reign of Charles II the rules were relaxed to allow women to play female roles on the London stage, reflecting the French fashion, and the convention of men routinely playing female roles consequently disappeared.
In the 1890s, the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions, and many other universities in which women were not permitted admission, were permissible fare to the same upper-class American audiences that were scandalized to hear that in New York City, rouged young men in skirts were standing on tables to dance the can-can in Bowery dives like The Slide.
Drag shows were popular night club entertainment in New York in the 1920s, then were forced underground, until the "Jewel Box Revue" played Harlem's Apollo Theater in the 1950s with their show, "49 Men and a Girl". For most of the performance, the "girls" were men in glamorous drag. At the end, the "one girl" was revealed to be the dashing young "man" in dinner clothes—Stormé DeLarverie—the MC who had been introducing each of the evening's acts.
The plot device of the film Shakespeare in Love turns upon the Elizabethan convention of the Shakespearean originals and the changes that came with women being allowed on stage during the reign of Charles II. However, drag remains a strong tradition in British comedy. This is seen in current-day British pantomime, where traditional roles such as the pantomime dame are played by a man in drag and the principal boy, such as Prince Charming or Dick Whittington, is played by a girl or young woman, as well as in comedy troupes such as Monty Python.
Within the dramatic fiction, a double standard historically affected the uses of drag. In male-dominated societies where active roles were reserved to men, a woman might dress as a man under the pressures of her dramatic predicament. In these societies a man's position was above a woman's, causing a rising action that suited itself to tragedy, sentimental melodrama and comedies of manners that involved confused identities. A man dressed as a woman was thought to be a falling action only suited to broad low comedy and burlesque. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are an all-male ballet troupe where much of the humor is in seeing male dancers en travesti; performing roles usually reserved to females, wearing tutus and dancing en pointe with considerable technical skill.
These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigid gender roles were undermined and began to dissolve. This evolution changed drag in the last decades of the 20th century. Among contemporary drag performers, the theatrical drag queen or street queen may at times be seen less as a "female impersonator" per se, but simply as a drag queen. Examples include The Cockettes, Danny La Rue or RuPaul.
Ball culture
Ballroom culture is an underground LGBT subculture that originated in 1920s New York in which people "walk" for trophies, prizes, and glory at events known as balls. Ball participants are mainly young African-American and Latin American members of the LGBTQ community. Attendees dance, vogue, walk, pose, and support one another in one or more of the numerous drag and performance competition categories. Categories are designed to simultaneously epitomize and satirize various genders, social classes and archetypes in society, while also offering an escape from reality. The culture extends beyond the extravagant formal events as many participants in ball culture also belong to groups known as "houses", a longstanding tradition in LGBT communities, and racial minorities, where chosen families of friends live in households together, forming relationships and community to replace families of origin from which they may be estranged.Ball culture first gained exposure to a mainstream audience in 1990 when its voguing dance style was featured in Madonna's song "Vogue", and in Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris is Burning the same year. Voguing is a highly stylized type of modern house dance that emerged in the 1980s and evolved out of 1960s ball culture in Harlem, New York. In 2018, the American television series Pose showcased Harlem's ball culture scene of the 1980s and was nominated for numerous awards.
Opera
In Baroque opera, where soprano roles for men were sung by castrati, Handel's heroine Bradamante, in the opera Alcina, disguises herself as a man to save her lover, played by a male soprano; contemporary audiences were not the least confused. In Romantic opera, certain roles of young boys were written for alto and soprano voices and acted by women en travestie. The most familiar trouser role in pre-Romantic opera is Cherubino in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. In Beethoven's opera Fidelio Leonore, the faithful wife of Florestan, disguises herself as a man to save her husband. Romantic opera continued the convention: there are trouser roles for women in drag in Rossini's Semiramide, Donizetti's Rosamonda d'Inghilterra and Anna Bolena, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, and even a page in Verdi's Don Carlo. The convention was beginning to die out with Siebel, the ingenuous youth in Charles Gounod's Faust and the gypsy boy Beppe in Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, so that Offenbach gave the role of Cupid to a real boy in Orphée aux Enfers. But Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in tights, giving French audiences a glimpse of Leg and Prince Orlovsky, who gives the ball in Die Fledermaus, is a mezzo-soprano, to somewhat androgynous effect. The use of travesti in Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier is a special case, unusually subtle and evocative of its 18th-century setting, and should be discussed in detail at ''Der Rosenkavalier.''Film and television
The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas's Charley's Aunt were still viable theatre material in La Cage aux Folles, which was remade, as The Birdcage, as late as 1996.Dame Edna, the drag persona of Australian actor Barry Humphries, was the host of several specials, including The Dame Edna Experience. Dame Edna also toured internationally, playing to sell-out crowds, and appeared on TV's Ally McBeal. Dame Edna represented an anomalous example of the drag concept. Her earliest incarnation was unmistakably a man dressed as a suburban housewife. Edna's manner and appearance became so feminised and glamorised that even some of her TV show guests appear not to see that the Edna character was played by a man. The furor surrounding Dame Edna's "advice" column in Vanity Fair magazine suggests that one of her harshest critics, actress Salma Hayek, was unaware Dame Edna was a female character played by a man.
In 2009, RuPaul's Drag Race first premiered as a television show in the United States. The show has gained mainstream and global appeal, and it has exposed multiple generations of audiences to drag culture.