Masculinities in Drag offers a largely speculative but theoretically engaged analysis of female masculinity as it is enacted through the forum of drag kinging. Drag kinging is the predominantly lesbian and queer female sub-cultural practice of female-to-male cross dressing, with most drag king performances promoting ‘the woman behind the man’. This emphasis on ‘femaleness’, even as it is ostensibly disguised in male drag, remains crucial to the many dynamics that arise through performing as a drag king and within drag king culture. This thesis promotes that emphasis by exploring and arguing for drag kinging as a performance of female identifications, erotic or otherwise, with masculinity within an exclusively queer female economy of desire. I employ various and varying theories on subjectivity, gender, desire, and fantasy to explore this, and further expand my analysis of female masculinity by focusing on the embodied and corporeal effects of performing as a drag king. This investigation reveals the refusal of drag kings to differentiate between traditional notions of mind/body, material/immaterial, and other adversarial boundaries in order to revel in new-found and provocative forms of embodiment and corporeality. Further, I develop the term ‘drag king embodiment’ to explain and expand on this, and to promote drag king embodiment as the corporeal ‘outcome’ of embodying desires for and fantasies of masculinity. This analysis extends to theoretically challenging accepted heteronormative models of gender, female desire, sexuality and subjectivity. However, such challenges reveal their dependency on these models, in so far as any perversion or subversion of them relies on acknowledging them as constraints – literally and figuratively. The ‘struggle’ against such models is not theorised as an inherently futile affair, but rather is viewed as a defining narrative that informs much of the erotic, sexual, and other dynamics of drag kinging and drag king culture. Exploration and analysis of female masculinity, in all its guises, calls into question the ‘natural’ socio-cultural position of women and their desires. By producing certain configurations of female identity, subjectivity, gender, sexuality and desire outside notions of ‘proper’ feminine identifications is to produce those identities fully inside. Effectively, drag king performances work this ‘weakness’ in the laws that govern ‘femaleness’ in order to promote, eroticise, and celebrate female masculinity. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1331403 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2008
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/264520 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Hanson, Julie Louise |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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