What a Drag!

Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, New York and London: Routledge, 2000.

Before beginning this book review, I have to confess that Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room was not quite what I expected. Published by Routledge, which has the reputation for publishing trendy, post-colonial/post-feminist/queer theory texts that have been criticized for being long on theory and short on research, I expected more of the same from Senelick's tome, which Routledge has categorized as Theatre Studies, Gender Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. Instead, I encountered a text which, while clearly informed by current performance and gender theory, relies on careful and exhaustive research, along with fascinating first person accounts of actual performances, in order to make a case for the atavistic and transformative nature of drag as it is played out on stage. Atavistic, because drag performance has its roots in the shape shifting, gender blending activities of prehistoric shamans. Transformative because, as Senelick argues, cross-dressing actors (who, for the most part, have been male) do not so much transgress binary categories of gender as create new categories. These new categories of gender, as exemplified by everything from the Indian hijras (castrated homosexuals) to the onnagata of the Kabuki theatre and the boy players of Elizabethan theatre, are accepted and acceptable precisely because they are played on the stage, a socially sanctioned institution that is nevertheless a haven for misfits and outcasts. "Stage gendered creatures are chimeras which elude the standard taxonomies and offer alternatives to the limited possibilities of lived reality. That these alternatives cannot exist outside the realm of the theatre makes them all the more cogent to the imagination."

Senelick's argument that throughout various histories and cultures "stage-gendered creatures" have had the ability to create new categories and configurations of gender, many of which do not transgress social norms, flies in the face of the more standard reading of cross dressing as inherently transgressive. It stands in stark opposition to Marjorie Garber's contention that the transvestite, and by extension the transvestite actor, throws the categories of gender into crisis. Garber's valorization of the transvestite occurred in Vested Interests (1993), a book whose combined attributes of good writing, up-to-the-minute contemporary theory, and salacious subject matter (cross-dressing), made it a must-have among the hip academic set (Vested Interests was published by Routledge). At the time that Vested Interests appeared, drag and drag performance had gone mainstream thanks to such popular cultural phenomena such as Jennie Livingston's film Paris is Burning, Madonna's Vogue, RuPaul's Supermodel, and the earlier Rocky Horror Picture Show. Meanwhile, the 1989 publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which many academics and art producers (mis)read as an endorsement of drag as the most transgressive type of gender performance, gave validity and significance to any and all forms of cross-dressing. After the publication of her book, Garber became a celebrity of sorts, appearing on talk shows, in published interviews, and anthologies of queer theory as an expert on drag.

Garber's reading of the transvestite as the third alternative to the existing binary categories of gender, however, a reading in which she relegated fluidity and ambiguity exclusively to this category, was more informed by a postmodern valorization of these latter qualities than based on historical context. In 1993, Butler published Bodies That Matter, which functioned as an elaboration/extension/corrective of her earlier theories of gender performance. In Bodies That Matter, Butler argued that the performance of gender was not a series of gestures and clothing that one consciously adopted, but rather the iteration and re-iteration of the language of gender. Hegemonic and repressive constructions of gender identity could be interrupted through subtle changes in gender iteration. The Changing Room can be read as the history of these subtle (and not so subtle) shifts in gender roles as they have been played out on stage. Rather than anachronistically valorize stage...