This Week’s Guest is Cam Crookston. We will be developing this page over the next weeks with him, so what follows is a work-in-progress. We will tell you here when the page is finalized–which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a look at it as it develops, and make use of anything we display!
Who will be here for the class (also see the Biographies page):
Cam Crookston is completing his PhD in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies here at the University of Toronto, on the performance of Drag in Western Society, and in particular how it acts as a way to explore the history of sexuality in North America. He is also editing a book of essays about RuPaul’s Drag Race, a model of what this course is about–performance, popular culture, ‘show business,’ and what happens when the word ‘popular’ shifts meaning (that was Stephen editorializing…).
Cam’s Introduction to the Class:
In the past decade RuPaul’s Drag Race has fundamentally altered the way the way audiences engage with drag. Many queer critics bemoan that the popular reality show has transformed what was once a radical, underground queer artform into a sanitized, mainstream pop sensation geared toward mass appeal. This is a compelling though, I would argue, overly simplistic narrative. In reality, drag, which is a broadly defined performance form, has taken on many forms and styles over the past 200-ish years. In the early twentieth century, drag performers and impersonators often attempted to stress the respectability and legitimacy of their artform to avoid harassment and arrest. More recently, much specifically queer drag often relies on a parodic relationship to mainstream popular culture, which is often an adoring, rather than critical relationship. I’d like to look at the various ways drag can be read as both conservative and radical. We’ll focus this on the recent popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I’m also very interested in what history has to say about this discussion. Here are a few questions to ponder:
Many have argued that drag emerged as a survival mechanism for queer culture. Can a survival strategy also be rebellious? Does drag tare down mainstream straight or merely mimic it? Does it have to be one or the other? There is also the long-standing academic debate about drag as gender “parody”? To what degree do drag queens satirize, aspire to, or merely play with “conventional” gender? And how might these questions have different a
What Cam is asking you to Read:
Cameron Crookston. “Off the Clock: Is Drag Just a Job?,” in Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 3:1 (101-115)
CROOKSTON Off the Clock
What Cam is asking you to look at:
RuPaul and Milton Berle- MTV 1993 (Warning: transphobic language)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5twsy6
An important note about this clip: A bit of context for the RuPaul and Milton Berle clip, significant as a message that relates history with contemporary practice: During the height RuPaul’s early pop music fame in the early 1990s, producers of the MTV movie awards thought it would be fun to pair “the biggest cross-dressing star of the present, with the biggest cross-dressing star of the past” so they invited Ru to present an award for Milton Berle. Ru alleges that Berle was verbally disrespectful during rehearsal and repeatedly grabbed part of his body backstage. Ru retaliated by going “off-book” during the broadcast and mocking Berle in front of the audience. This led to a tense television moment that, I think, also speaks to the chasm between their respective definitions of “cross-dressing.”
Stephen’s ‘old-timer’ note: Milton Berle was the first major ‘star’ on television, with a variety show that aired beginning in 1948–before anyone thought television was a technology that anyone could watch for more than a few minutes at a time. His show was successful in ways no one would have guessed. People bought television sets to see his show. What was he? A moderately successful comic in live vaudeville–which was dying. A burlesque artist. A coarse monologuist. And a major part of his act was his gender-mocking cross-dressing (see my potted history below). Ru Paul meeting Milton Berle is a very strange case of mis-understanding history. Something to talk about.
Drag Queen Story Time Toronto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3y3ZIBN7fc
Vaginal Crème Davis (Contains brief nudity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A03i57f53E4
Chick-Filet Parody Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO-msplukrw
Recommended Viewing:
Allysin Chaynes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgYGmlKY8_g
Brooklyn Heights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a-aOtNyljE
RPDR- Snatch Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB2IWDvRb3M
What you will do to prepare:
Some of you will act as ‘Resident Authorities’ during this class, talking with Cam as he discusses his work with you all, and also allowing him to ask you about the subject. This brief précis is published just so you have a sense of what choices to make for your own assignments to a class. It will be replaced with more information soon, and with readings and links at least six days before the class. Don’t hesitate to write to the Instructors with any questions: stephen.johnson@utoronto.ca ; or sarah.robbins@utoronto.ca
And finally, some notes about the History of Drag:
‘Drag’ as a matter of cross-dressing, or dressing against gender, goes as far back in the history of performance…as performance; and it raises some basic questions about costuming, disguise, and ‘showing’ or ‘display.’ It’s all a part of our larger discussion of the depiction of (and appropriation of) any group, defined by gender, and also race (eg., minstrelsy), and the depiction/appropriation of celebrity (eg., discussion of Elvis ‘tribute artists’). Not that ‘drag’ isn’t different–it is. But the barriers are porous–there are ways in which race, celebrity, gender, class…and other ways of defining groups in popular culture, overlap. So as you read and view and think about this subject,consider that larger picture. Knowledge is cumulative.
There are two traditions of ‘drag,’ that will come as no surprise. In one, the one gender is entirely suppressed by the other, and the audience cannot really identify the gender of the ‘performer’ underneath the ‘character’–see the early 20th century actor Julian Eltinge (you can look him up) for this figure. In the other, the identified gender of the performer is clearly identifiable, and identifiably at odds, with the identified gender of the ‘character’–in other words, the performer plays the gender ‘badly,’ generally for humour. The English Pantomime form (still performed every year in Toronto) typically has a ‘Dame’ role, which is drag (again, you can look that up). I suspect you will know these two ‘types’–one is unsettling because the performance is too good, and the other is unsettling because it isn’t good enough.
Cam’s argument–though he will correct me during the class, I’m sure–is that the performance of ‘drag’ is in fact quite conservative, with respect to definitions of gender, which have been complicated and enriched greatly over the past twenty years. There are performers who perform against the ‘traditions’ of drag, some of whom rebel against it even in the midst of that culture.
Enter RuPaul….
Performance and Popular Culture 