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Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings
- GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
- Duke University Press
- Volume 7, Number 3, 2001
- pp. 425-452
- Article
- Additional Information
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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.3 (2001) 425-452
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Oh Behave!
Austin Powers and the Drag Kings
Judith Halberstam
[Figures]
That ain't no woman! It's a man, man!
--Austin Powers
There has been much ink spilled in the popular media and in popular queer culture about the intimate relations between gay men and straight women. The "fag hag" role has become a staple feature of popular film, and at least part of the explanation for how gay male culture and gay male images have so thoroughly penetrated popular film and TV cultures lies in the recognized and indeed lived experience of bonds between "queens" and "girls." There is no such parallel between lesbians and straight men. While the dynamic between lesbians and hetero-males could change significantly in the next few decades as more and more lesbians become parents and raise sons, for the moment there seem to be no sitcoms on the horizon ready to exploit the humorous possibilities of interactions between a masculine woman and her butch guy pal. This is not to say that no relations exist between the way lesbians produce and circulate cultures of masculinity and the way men do. However, these relations are for the most part submerged and mediated and difficult to read.
This essay will trace the strange and barely discernible influence of lesbian drag-king cultures on hetero-male comic film. My contention will not be that straight men learn how to parody masculinity from butch women and then take that parody to the bank; rather, I will try to map circuits of subcultural influence across a wide range of textual play. I take for granted Dick Hebdige's formulation of subcultures as marginalized cultures that are quickly absorbed by capitalism and then robbed of their oppositional power, 1 but I will expand on Hebdige's influential reading of subcultures by arguing that some subcultures do not simply fade away as soon as they have been plundered for material. Furthermore, I emphasize [End Page 425] the utility of tracking precisely when, where, and how the subculture is "beamed up" into the mainstream. Tracing the mysterious process by which, say, a performance in a queer nightclub or a genre of queer humor or a specific mode of parody has been observed, appreciated, and then reproduced is not simple and has much to offer future studies of the ever more complex lines of affiliation between the marginal and the dominant. One obvious way to trace the difference between the dominant and the marginal in this instance is to see who becomes rich from certain performances of male parody and who never materially benefits at all. Yet profit is not ultimately the best gauge of success, and it may well be that by tracing a cultural phenomenon back to its source, we restore a different kind of prestige to the subculture and honor its creativity in the process.
King Comedies
For abject English masculinity films, 1997 was a banner year: The Full Monty (dir. Peter Cattaneo) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (dir. Jay Roach) both took American audiences by surprise. The Full Monty, for example, was made for only $3 million, but within a few months it had made twice that much at the box office. Both of these "king comedies," as I like to call them, using king as a more precise term than camp, were built around the surprising vulnerabilities of the English male body and psyche. Indeed, the king comedy attempts to exploit not the power but the frailty of the male body for the purpose of generating laughs at the hero's expense. King comedies also capitalize on the humor that comes from revealing the derivative nature of dominant masculinities, and so they trade heavily in the tropes of doubling, disguise, and impersonation. So while Austin Powers parodically reenacts a long tradition of secret-agent films and raids the coffers of sexist British humor from Benny Hill to the Carry On comedies, The Full Monty forces its lads...