Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
(Sigh)
The great gender theorist and performance artist RuPaul once said,
“We are born naked, and the rest is drag.”
Yeah?
So, as somebody who teaches gender studies,
I can explain this quote to you a little bit.
There are theories that, while we are born with a physical body
that defines our biological sex –
Oh! –
we every day wake up and decide
to make a conscious decision to perform our gender.
We make a decision every day not to become a gender,
but how we present it to the rest of the world.
Now, as somebody who’s a theater professor,
I could explain to you that drag, as a form of performance,
has existed for as long as recorded history,
that, in almost every culture and across the millennia,
there has been cross-gender performance.
And, up until about 100 years ago, it was the common practice,
it was the standard, it was something that was just conventionally done.
And it was really in the 20th century
that cross-gender performance and drag became something “dangerous”, subversive,
and the reason for that is because, in the 20th century,
drag became associated with homosexuality, with gays, with lesbians,
with those we would call “queer” in the United States,
anyone non-heterosexual.
And it could be this reason that I became drawn to drag.
In 1994, which was the year that I was 13 years old
and figured out I was gay – yeah, really young, really young -,
a film came out that I had the good fortune to see.
It’s an Australian film
called “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”
Now, as a 13-year-old watching this film, I was struck by one particular scene.
There’s a scene in which these three Australian drag queens
are traveling across the outback to go perform all over the country,
and the name of their bus is “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,”
the most important character in the film.
And, in this scene, that you can see above you,
there is a drag queen strapped to the top of the bus
wearing a silver frock blowing behind her as she sings opera.
And, as a 13-year-old,
I though this was the most beautiful scene I had ever seen in my life.
And why did I think that was beautiful? Well, a couple of reasons.
First of all, it was just aesthetically incredible.
This film won the Academy Award for costume design that year.
But it was also because it was so dangerous,
it was so risky, it was so transgressive,
and it was this declaration of self no matter how outrageous it was.
It was this living out loud that just impressed me so much,
and it was at that time I came to really love and respect drag.
Cut to 2013,
I’m a faculty member at the Boston Conservatory,
and I’m one of only a few people with a Ph.D. in the program,
and so I have to teach a lot of academic classes.
So the head of my department comes to me and says,
“We have a lot of students in the Theater Department
who really want a gender studies class.
Can you do that? And, because it’s a conservatory… make it a little fun.”
So, I thought, “Well, what could I teach?
Drag! Why couldn’t I teach drag? Of course!
Not only is this a Theater Department made up of performers,
but a very large percentage of these performers
identify as some form of queer, or bisexual, or gay, or lesbian.
So, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to make this class really interesting.
I’m going to make the first two-thirds of it history, theory,
looking at different cultures, different time periods,
how cross-gender performance has manifested.
And then, in the last third of the class, the students have to devise a project.
They have to create their own drag character.
That character needs to be influenced by something that we studied
over the course of the semester,
or it could be autobiographical,
or it could something that we didn’t even learn,
something that nobody’s done before, something that nobody expects.
And I presented this to the students
and I thought that they were going to love it!
You know, these were theater students in Boston.
I thought they would be like, “Yeah! It’s great! Awesome!”
They were terrified, and resentful,
“Why do we have to do this? Can’t we just write a research –
Can we write a research paper?
That would be great. Twelve pages, 15 pages.”
And I wondered, “Why is this something that people are so resistant to?”
And, as I started talking to my students,
what started coming from them was a lot of fear,
and that fear was fear of failure,
fear of looking ridiculous or foolish,
and fear of rejection.
And what the students started telling me
was that this was unlike any other kind of performance
because this was performance that was subversive, risky, dangerous,
something that’s not looked on as legitimate or appropriate,
something that’s not for families or children, right?
It’s something that’s very underground.
And that’s understandable, right,
that, as performers, you’re already very vulnerable,
because you’re presenting yourself up in front of a room.
Right now, this what I’m doing is performance and it’s vulnerable, right?
But add this other layer of doing something
that is, in our society, not seen as important, or beautiful, or risky.
It’s seen as something pretty adult,
and pretty, you know, nightclubby, you know, after-hours kind of thing.
So, I don’t want to do the cliché
of, “My students teach me more than I teach my students,”
but there’s some truth to that
because the projects my students have been devising over the last three years
have blown my mind.
I mean, the range is staggering, and I wish I could show you 100 slides.
It goes from my student Jack, who decided not to go too deep.
So, he did “Adult Little Orphan Annie,”
who is now a drug dealer.
There are students who perform glamorous, glamorous female characters,
in a sort of tradition of glamour drag that’s existed since the 1920s and ’30s.
There are students who did celebrity impersonations.
My student Charlie,
who’s now a professional drag queen in New York and plays Kris Jenner,
like you do.
There are students who play ghosts, ghostly characters of another gender,
who tell us their life stories
and share these very personal narratives that my students come up with.
There are students who come up with futuristic, post-apocalyptic,
post-gender, post-sexuality characters
who are in a dystopian world,
where being who they are is something very dangerous.
This is very Margaret Atwood kind of work, right?
And then, I have students who do very autobiographical material,
and what they do is they create the other gender version of themselves.
Both men and women do this,
and they come up with this character that is them, but as another gender,
and they talk about that side of themselves,
they talk about what that person is like.
In the case of Kyle here, you know, his female persona:
what is she like? What does she like to do?
How is she different from Kyle?
So, yes, the broadness of this material is very impressive,
and there are so many more characters that are now in the files,
what these students have created.
But what it has shown me is that drag is much more vital
and much more powerful a form of performance and entertainment
than I even thought possible,
because I think what drag does
is it challenges this idea that we have this fixed self, yeah?
We live in a very identity-oriented world,
and we have these identities that we present,
and that’s fixed, that’s something that remains as such,
and we really don’t allow for change.
We don’t allow ourself to change, we don’t allow other people to change.
We really like it when people are stagnant and we know who they are
and that they’re not going to change.
But what drag does,
besides letting us play with the idea that gender is more flexible, more fluid,
it also asks us to tap into parts of our identity
that we wouldn’t otherwise tap into,
explore other parts of who we are not just about gender,
but in term of what we like, what we believe, what we value,
what we dislike, yeah?
So,
I think drag can do that in a way that is safe.
It’s a performance, right?
And, even though performances are a very vulnerable thing,
what drag can do is give you a stage
for exploring these sides of your identity,
where you might not otherwise get to do that out in the world
where your fixed identity is supposed to be really static.
So, something that has been connected with drag
that I think really encapsulates why it’s such an important genre of theater:
in 1960s and 1970s,
African American gay culture in New York really defined what drag performance was
for the late 20th and early 21st century, and we’re still living in that era.
And there’s a whole vocabulary that came from that time,
and some of the words that we now use to describe drag
I think really cement what it is I’m trying to tell you.
There are two words.
The first word is “werk,” W, E, R, K.
It’s a misspelling, intentionally, of the word “work,” W, O, R, K,
and what it means, roughly,
is that you are doing something fabulously,
you are doing something with confidence,
and you are doing something near perfectly, right?
So, if you ever hear the RuPaul song “Supermodel (You Better Werk),”
that is what she is telling you to do on the runway.
And one who “werks,” right, can be described as “fierce,” yeah?
And “fierce” is a word that I think best describes what drag tries to do.
When you are fierce,
you are wholly yourself, living out loud,
unabashedly, bravely, without shame,
full confidence, full pride in the self.
And I think that’s something that we can all learn to do,
to be more “fierce” and to “werk.”
So, as you go on and explore your identities,
as we all try to find the ways in which we are more complex, more beautiful,
all I can say is, “You better werk.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Sigh)
The great gender theorist and performance artist RuPaul once said,
“We are born naked, and the rest is drag.”
Yeah?
So, as somebody who teaches gender studies,
I can explain this quote to you a little bit.
There are theories that, while we are born with a physical body
that defines our biological sex –
Oh! –
we every day wake up and decide
to make a conscious decision to perform our gender.
We make a decision every day not to become a gender,
but how we present it to the rest of the world.
Now, as somebody who’s a theater professor,
I could explain to you that drag, as a form of performance,
has existed for as long as recorded history,
that, in almost every culture and across the millennia,
there has been cross-gender performance.
And, up until about 100 years ago, it was the common practice,
it was the standard, it was something that was just conventionally done.
And it was really in the 20th century
that cross-gender performance and drag became something “dangerous”, subversive,
and the reason for that is because, in the 20th century,
drag became associated with homosexuality, with gays, with lesbians,
with those we would call “queer” in the United States,
anyone non-heterosexual.
And it could be this reason that I became drawn to drag.
In 1994, which was the year that I was 13 years old
and figured out I was gay – yeah, really young, really young -,
a film came out that I had the good fortune to see.
It’s an Australian film
called “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”
Now, as a 13-year-old watching this film, I was struck by one particular scene.
There’s a scene in which these three Australian drag queens
are traveling across the outback to go perform all over the country,
and the name of their bus is “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,”
the most important character in the film.
And, in this scene, that you can see above you,
there is a drag queen strapped to the top of the bus
wearing a silver frock blowing behind her as she sings opera.
And, as a 13-year-old,
I though this was the most beautiful scene I had ever seen in my life.
And why did I think that was beautiful? Well, a couple of reasons.
First of all, it was just aesthetically incredible.
This film won the Academy Award for costume design that year.
But it was also because it was so dangerous,
it was so risky, it was so transgressive,
and it was this declaration of self no matter how outrageous it was.
It was this living out loud that just impressed me so much,
and it was at that time I came to really love and respect drag.
Cut to 2013,
I’m a faculty member at the Boston Conservatory,
and I’m one of only a few people with a Ph.D. in the program,
and so I have to teach a lot of academic classes.
So the head of my department comes to me and says,
“We have a lot of students in the Theater Department
who really want a gender studies class.
Can you do that? And, because it’s a conservatory… make it a little fun.”
So, I thought, “Well, what could I teach?
Drag! Why couldn’t I teach drag? Of course!
Not only is this a Theater Department made up of performers,
but a very large percentage of these performers
identify as some form of queer, or bisexual, or gay, or lesbian.
So, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to make this class really interesting.
I’m going to make the first two-thirds of it history, theory,
looking at different cultures, different time periods,
how cross-gender performance has manifested.
And then, in the last third of the class, the students have to devise a project.
They have to create their own drag character.
That character needs to be influenced by something that we studied
over the course of the semester,
or it could be autobiographical,
or it could something that we didn’t even learn,
something that nobody’s done before, something that nobody expects.
And I presented this to the students
and I thought that they were going to love it!
You know, these were theater students in Boston.
I thought they would be like, “Yeah! It’s great! Awesome!”
They were terrified, and resentful,
“Why do we have to do this? Can’t we just write a research –
Can we write a research paper?
That would be great. Twelve pages, 15 pages.”
And I wondered, “Why is this something that people are so resistant to?”
And, as I started talking to my students,
what started coming from them was a lot of fear,
and that fear was fear of failure,
fear of looking ridiculous or foolish,
and fear of rejection.
And what the students started telling me
was that this was unlike any other kind of performance
because this was performance that was subversive, risky, dangerous,
something that’s not looked on as legitimate or appropriate,
something that’s not for families or children, right?
It’s something that’s very underground.
And that’s understandable, right,
that, as performers, you’re already very vulnerable,
because you’re presenting yourself up in front of a room.
Right now, this what I’m doing is performance and it’s vulnerable, right?
But add this other layer of doing something
that is, in our society, not seen as important, or beautiful, or risky.
It’s seen as something pretty adult,
and pretty, you know, nightclubby, you know, after-hours kind of thing.
So, I don’t want to do the cliché
of, “My students teach me more than I teach my students,”
but there’s some truth to that
because the projects my students have been devising over the last three years
have blown my mind.
I mean, the range is staggering, and I wish I could show you 100 slides.
It goes from my student Jack, who decided not to go too deep.
So, he did “Adult Little Orphan Annie,”
who is now a drug dealer.
There are students who perform glamorous, glamorous female characters,
in a sort of tradition of glamour drag that’s existed since the 1920s and ’30s.
There are students who did celebrity impersonations.
My student Charlie,
who’s now a professional drag queen in New York and plays Kris Jenner,
like you do.
There are students who play ghosts, ghostly characters of another gender,
who tell us their life stories
and share these very personal narratives that my students come up with.
There are students who come up with futuristic, post-apocalyptic,
post-gender, post-sexuality characters
who are in a dystopian world,
where being who they are is something very dangerous.
This is very Margaret Atwood kind of work, right?
And then, I have students who do very autobiographical material,
and what they do is they create the other gender version of themselves.
Both men and women do this,
and they come up with this character that is them, but as another gender,
and they talk about that side of themselves,
they talk about what that person is like.
In the case of Kyle here, you know, his female persona:
what is she like? What does she like to do?
How is she different from Kyle?
So, yes, the broadness of this material is very impressive,
and there are so many more characters that are now in the files,
what these students have created.
But what it has shown me is that drag is much more vital
and much more powerful a form of performance and entertainment
than I even thought possible,
because I think what drag does
is it challenges this idea that we have this fixed self, yeah?
We live in a very identity-oriented world,
and we have these identities that we present,
and that’s fixed, that’s something that remains as such,
and we really don’t allow for change.
We don’t allow ourself to change, we don’t allow other people to change.
We really like it when people are stagnant and we know who they are
and that they’re not going to change.
But what drag does,
besides letting us play with the idea that gender is more flexible, more fluid,
it also asks us to tap into parts of our identity
that we wouldn’t otherwise tap into,
explore other parts of who we are not just about gender,
but in term of what we like, what we believe, what we value,
what we dislike, yeah?
So,
I think drag can do that in a way that is safe.
It’s a performance, right?
And, even though performances are a very vulnerable thing,
what drag can do is give you a stage
for exploring these sides of your identity,
where you might not otherwise get to do that out in the world
where your fixed identity is supposed to be really static.
So, something that has been connected with drag
that I think really encapsulates why it’s such an important genre of theater:
in 1960s and 1970s,
African American gay culture in New York really defined what drag performance was
for the late 20th and early 21st century, and we’re still living in that era.
And there’s a whole vocabulary that came from that time,
and some of the words that we now use to describe drag
I think really cement what it is I’m trying to tell you.
There are two words.
The first word is “werk,” W, E, R, K.
It’s a misspelling, intentionally, of the word “work,” W, O, R, K,
and what it means, roughly,
is that you are doing something fabulously,
you are doing something with confidence,
and you are doing something near perfectly, right?
So, if you ever hear the RuPaul song “Supermodel (You Better Werk),”
that is what she is telling you to do on the runway.
And one who “werks,” right, can be described as “fierce,” yeah?
And “fierce” is a word that I think best describes what drag tries to do.
When you are fierce,
you are wholly yourself, living out loud,
unabashedly, bravely, without shame,
full confidence, full pride in the self.
And I think that’s something that we can all learn to do,
to be more “fierce” and to “werk.”
So, as you go on and explore your identities,
as we all try to find the ways in which we are more complex, more beautiful,
all I can say is, “You better werk.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
Please follow and like us: