Down-under drag : inside Australia's drag king and drag queen communities

Down-Under Drag is an ethnographic exploration into the lived experiences of Australian drag queens and drag kings. Drag is a unique performance art that hinges on the notion of cross dressing – where a performer’s presentation of gender, in drag, is not aligned with his or her biological sex. This performance style is predominantly undertaken by gay, lesbian and transgendered individuals as a form of entertainment in gay and lesbian communities and usually involves the adoption of a hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine disguise by the performer. Through methods of interviewing and observation, this thesis offers first-hand information into the experiences of a range of Australian drag performers, undertaking a thematic analysis of a variety of key concepts as emerged from those experiences. Through a grounded theory approach, the analytical exploration of such concepts has informed the theoretical material used to better understand those experiences. Namely, through the application of Butler’s post-structuralist theory of gender performativity (1990), this thesis views gender as social construct, created and maintained through the repetition of various stylized acts. With the help of Butler (1990, 2004) I will argue that drag performers take up multiple, shifting and contradictory gendered subjectivities. As most academic literature available in this area of study deals primarily with drag king and queen cultures in isolation, the aim of this thesis is to analytically compare these performance cultures and the roles their performers take up as entertainers and socialisers within Australian gay communities. I will demonstrate that these performers use the medium of drag most frequently as a tool for critique - particularly concerning normative constructs of sex and gender- and also as a tool to pay homage to those constructs. This thesis will argue that practices of drag create a persistent and productive tension between the forces of subversion and the forces of normativity