Thursday, April 07, 2011
It's a Drag for Women
Backstage: "A man dressed as a woman on a Broadway stage is not even a hot topic anymore. Currently, Harvey Fierstein dons drag in the musical 'La Cage aux Folles' and Brian Bedford portrays the aged Lady Augusta Bracknell in 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' which received a 17-week extension in January. Both performances have garnered extremely positive reviews, and the shows generate solid box-office numbers week after week.
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I think that this is all rapped up in who has privilege and who doesn’t. If you are a man you intrinsically have more privilege and if you give that up it adds a certain comedy to whatever you are doing. But if you are a woman trying to be a man then you are trying to gain power and it is almost as if you are making fun of the people in power. Also this interpretation, stereotypes men, and makes us feel uncomfortable.
In addition it is interesting to think about the differences between becoming a role as you are, changing the role to your gender, and then putting on a character of the gender you are portraying. This article also forces you to look at gender as if it were a scale and not in categories; I think that is hard for many people to do. Also I think that most of the drag that is done by men is done in jest, and it is comical, because the audience thinks to themselves “why would a man ever dress up and act that way? That’s preposterous.”
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