Unassuming Gender

Alternative identity performances have always characterized subcultures. Dick Hebdige documented the punks and the mods of the UK in the late 1970s in his landmark book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. In the thirty-odd years since he launched his investigation, resistant subcultural styles have, just as he predicted, been co-opted by capitalism, their often politically progressive or at least oppositional meanings all but wiped out by its voracious appetite for appropriating the new. I thought a lot about subcultures and style reading two new books on gender performance in everyday life and in theatre: Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre and Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms’s collaboratively written Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance, both published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. (Full disclosure: Davy’s book is part of a series I co-edit with David Román at Michigan called “Triangulations: Lesbian/ Gay/Queer Drama/Theatre/Performance,” which showcases scholarship on queer performance broadly construed. Although I have no editorial relationship to the Torr/Bottoms book, I do have a close connection to the press, given the Triangulations series and Michigan’s support of my own scholarship.)

But my discussion here isn’t meant as a “review,” per se, so much as it is a meditation on the resonance of these books in a contemporary moment when gender performance has become so much more visible in American culture. In the early 1980s, the women at WOW were creating performance under the rubric of an outré feminism at odds with its predominating party line. Torr was performing in male drag and beginning to teach other women how to do the same. Using performance in such politically edgy gendered ways was practically revolutionary then and often caused an uproar among women spectators whose tastes were more catholic. Women performing as men; the blatant erotics of same-sex desire; the parody of male power and the popular culture venues in which it was enshrined; an openness to experimenting with sex roles and sexuality, all in framed performances that frequently bled into the performance of everyday life—all these choices offered exciting alternatives to a more serious and staid feminist culture.

These days, what scholar Judith Halberstam described in the late 1990s as “female masculinity” is more visible in mainstream American culture. The so-called pregnant man, Thomas Beatie, was profiled in People Magazine, among many other popular publications, when he and his partner decided to have a child that he carried. Although Beatie is a “transman”—a female-to-male transgendered person who lives as a man—he hadn’t had surgery to remove his female reproductive organs, and was able to carry the baby to term. Chaz Bono, the daughter of Cher and Sonny Bono, who grew up on national television as a towheaded little girl named Chastity, was also featured in People when he publicly declared his intention to live as a man. Although the popular press’s attention to Beatie and Bono is nothing if not prurient, these men’s visibility and their very presence in the widely circulated magazine mark a sea-change in American attitudes toward gender.

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers and Sex, Drag, and Male Roles provide crucial historical context to remind readers that a short thirty years ago, attitudes toward gender fluidity were much less forgiving. Years before Judith Butler published Gender Trouble (1990), her landmark theoretical study of “gender performativity,” those Davy calls the “WOW girls” had already experimented personally, politically, and in performance with the notion of gender as what Butler called a surface enactment of culture style. WOW performances already parodied socially inculcated binary gender roles dictated to be strictly (and innately) masculine and feminine, congruent with biological sex seen only as male or female.

The WOW Café still...