someone please help me i dont understand drag queens

queeranarchism:

fuckokay:

i know i should just do research on it and its not anyones responsibility to explain it to me but i just want to talk to someone who is actually a drag queen so maybe i can get it. my thing is i feel like its just men making fun of women, but i know that can’t be the whole story ??? so please just if youre a drag queen and you can find it in your heart to talk to me about it hit me up

*Waves*

Hi! I hope you don’t mind if I answer this question, even though I’m more of a queer transvestite/dragqueen/genderfuck/in-between than someone who performs on stage as a drag queen. 

First: there are totally sexist jerks who dress up as women to mock them. You meet them a lot on bachelor parties drinking beer out of plastic boobs and making the most horrible misogynist jokes. And you occasionally meet drag queens who do drag as a joke at the expense of women. That’s true. though in my experience there are not many of them because that joke gets old really quickly and those men move on to other interests. 

For most drag queens, I think, drag is about men and genderdiverse people expressing their femininity in the most unapologetic way possible. Almost every drag queen has at some point in their lives looked at beautiful nail polish or a gorgeous prom dress or killer heels and thought “I wish I could wear those.” Or maybe they’ve just felt extremely confined emotionally in the concept of ‘manliness’, which is an incredible rigid space. So they wanted to express their feminitity. 

But the amount of freedom men have in expressing feminitity is extremely limited. A touch of pink on your shirt? people will ask you about your sexuality. A bit of make up? people will get nasty. A skirt? dangerous gender rebel! With so much gender policing going on, it’s very stressful to constantly navigate the boundaries. “With this clear nail polish I can go about my daily life without too much trouble, but what happens if I wear the light pinkish one I really want to wear? Would that cross the line where people stop accepting me? Or not yet?”. Expressing bits of feminitity at a time is a vulnerable stressful process.  

What’s the solution? All out unapologetic hyper feminitity. Being so feminine that no one can accuse you of feminitity, because its right there and obvious. There is no need to stress out about whether people notice that you’re feminine because of course they notice. The uncertainty is gone and what remains is a bit ‘fuck you’ to the gender police. It’s a “YES, I’M FEMININE, SO WHAT? EAT MY GLITTER!”. Drag is a way of intimidating people who would usually attack your feminitity and it’s a kind of armour that way. And it’s also a celebration because that armour gives you the freedom to be as feminine as you want to be and then more. It gives you the freedom to experiment with ways of expressing feminitity. It is expressing yourself, but without being too serious about it. 

That being said: People who are sexist AND do drag totally exist, and it is quite possible for a drag queen to make very sexist jokes while in drag. But that’s not why she’s wearing drag.