In December 2018, I watched an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a decades-old reality show featuring a competition for drag queens. The episode was a doozy to start with, because the week’s challenge was to not dress up in glamour but dress down – as nude women.
This set me off on what became an exploration of drag queen culture, history and the implications of hypersexualized femaleness by (mainly gay) men.
What resulted was a multi-chapter, 17-page research piece which has women contacting me about how they always kind of felt that way about drag but weren’t sure if or how to express it.
Check it out… It’s on Medium. And tell me what you think.
From Drags to Bitches: The implications of mainstreamed drag culture on women
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Down a rabbit hole, I am Alice in Wonderland
- Religious Rites to Boogie Nights: A too-short history of drag
- Gay and Drag: Deleting the ‘mask’ in masculine
- RuPaul’s Drag Race: Brilliant and groundbreaking and “a big F you”
- The Naked Episode: Making ‘TMI’ out of ‘not enough’
- To Kill a Mocked Bird: Clumpy mascara and overdrawn lipliner as ‘Girlface’
- He Drag/She Drag: There’s a glass ceiling for everything
- The Yeshiva Cross Dressing Paradox: A personal observation
- Conclusion: We’re real, and we’re spectacular
Whadya got: