Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Representations of drag in popular media tend to be cyclical in their frequency, but one constant seems to be their tendency to obscure their complicated past. This is especially true where transgressive gender performance is conflated with issues of race and class. Drag as a cultural practice steeped in critique of the gender binary and its role in reinforcing class-based power structures dates to at least the 16th century, when troops of primarily men in England and France satirically assumed female court personae as a form of protest against taxes and other perceived excesses of the monarchy (Ackroyd). Later, drag “balls” became a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance in New York of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a safe space for lesbians and gay men and participants whose manner of dress, speech, and behavior blurred conventional boundaries between the masculine and feminine (Chauncey, Gay New York).
Repository Citation
Drushel, Bruce. "Performing Race, Class and Gender: The Tangled History of Drag." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 13, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1–20. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol13/iss2/3