Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender, and Sociality in the Cook Islands

Chapter Four Paramount Queens: Femininity and Global/Local Dissonance

chapter four PARAMOUNT QUEENS FEMININITY AND GLOBAL/LOCAL DISSONANCE The 1998 Drag Queen Competition that Marcia referred to during the Miss Cook Islands beauty pageant was held at TJ’s nightclub on a Wednesday night. The venue was full an hour before the show was to begin. The composition of the audience suggested that this was a popular and mainstream event that attracted people who normally do not go out to nightclubs. Alongside young people who regularly went out were friends and family of the contestants and older people who went to nightclubs only for special events. There were no tourists. An Lshaped catwalk draped with leafy foliage had been constructed to extend from the dance floor. Chalked onto a large blackboard behind the catwalk was “Drag Queen 1998” and the names of the sponsors—Air New Zealand and the Printing Company, a local manufacturing business. The emcee was a female netball champion who at the beginning of the competition introduced three male judges sitting on separate tables on the edge of the dance floor: a representative from Air New Zealand, the local news broadcaster, and the special events co-coordinator of Tourism Cook Islands. After a brief prayer conducted by the emcee, the  8=6EI:G ;DJG competition began with the emcee’s invitation: “Let’s welcome the ladies with the extras.” The event was modeled on Western-style drag shows and beauty pageants. Five contestants participated in three sections: pāreu (swimwear), talent, and evening wear. As the contestants emerged for the pāreu section, they were greeted with screams of appreciation and applause from the audience. Each contestant paraded around the dance floor and up and down the catwalk, wearing pāreu tied into skimpy versions of the styles of Cook Islands women and accessorized with local hats and flower wreaths. The screams escalated as contestants undid their pāreu to reveal swimsuits (and in one case, a G-string) and made erotic gestures involving their breasts or stylized grabbing of their groin. These gestures were combined with bursts of Cook Islands female dancing: a subtle flick of the hip (patu) and short displays of fast hip movements. The movements just described are one example of how the 1998 Drag Queen Competition incorporated local and Western modes of cross-dressing.1 The style of “crotch grab” performed by two of the contestants, for instance, may be traced to Michael Jackson’s infamous gesture in the music videos from his album Thriller. The move has been adopted by many popular music artists since and by young Cook Islanders when dancing to their music. That the crotch grab movement mimicked a Western popular cultural genre is not to say it was simply derivative. As I argued in chapter 2, innovation, the creation of “something different,” often involves imitation of outside expressive styles. It is a central, if contested, aspect of artistic production to appropriate outside cultural flows into local currencies of value. This kind of incorporation effects the “domestication of the West” (Cannell 1995, 251), the control and mastery of the foreign. In this particular drag competition , Western cultural forms were integrated concurrently as a “display of translocality ” (Besnier 2002, 534); they referenced, and were situated in, a broader global context. As will become evident, all of the contestants, albeit to varying degrees, actively oriented their display of local drag practices toward global cosmopolitanism understood by Cook Islanders in this instance as Western or papa‘ā. In the following discussion of the 1998 Drag Queen competition, I examine the ways in which local and Western styles are put together by contestants. Throughout the competition, references (through personas, clothing, music, and movements) were made to Western drag shows and to local styles of cross-dressing and dancing. The individual performances also drew upon Western and Cook Islands notions of feminine beauty, sexuality (both same and opposite sex), and gender roles. However , the interaction between local and Western styles in the 1998 Drag Queen  ;:B>C>C>IN 6C9 HHDC6C8: competition was not considered particularly successful. It included performances that resulted in the show being judged by many in the audience as less than entertaining and, at times, highly distasteful. These sentiments were summed up in the aftermath, as the unanimous reaction to the competition was, “It was stink.” This reaction was strikingly different from the reception of other drag and cross-dressing performances, which were usually viewed as very...