Drag Queens and Drag Kings

Drag queens and drag kings are men, women, and transgendered people who perform femininity, masculinity, or something in between. Drag in various forms can be found in almost all parts of the world, and increasingly a transnational drag culture is evolving. Traditionally, drag queens have been gay men who cross‐dress and lip‐synch to recorded music in gay or tourist venues, but the world of drag has become much more complicated with the emergence of drag king troupes, ballroom in black and Latino communities in the United States, and the participation of transgender, transsexual, and even heterosexual people in drag performances. Much of the scholarship on drag has focused on the question of how much such performances reify or challenge femininity and masculinity. Drag king troupes, influenced by feminism and queer theory, tend very consciously to deconstruct masculinity and femininity in performances, including by “faux queens” – also called “bio queens” – women who perform femininity or femininity as performed by drag queens. But even traditional drag queens, a variety of scholars have argued, undermine the notion of a polarized gender system by displaying the performative nature of gender.