Title: The Trouble with “Queerness”: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures
Abstract: Responding to a conference paper on queer psychoanalysis whose examples centered on the lives of gay men, a prominent lesbian feminist asked, "Where are the women?" Alluding to the truism that queer theory is gay male theory cloaked in more inclusive language, this comment reminds us that at the juncture of gender and "queer" sexuality lurks a perpetual question as to what such a nebulous term assumes and what it effaces. But a further question goes unasked in the grammar of "Where are the women?"—a question I propose we take seriously. That is, in any given work of queer theory, why should there necessarily be women (or for that matter gay men, bisexuals, etc.)? This article challenges the efficaciousness of an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to queer theorizing—as well as the paradoxically heteronormative presumption that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transsexuals ought a priori to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise—through a comparison of drag king and queen performance cultures at a Cleveland gay bar. Although they are discursively equated under the heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions overlap little with respect to demographics, movement vocabulary, audience repartee and etiquette, stage persona, self-styling, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. The radical (in)difference between king and queen cultures testifies to "queer"'s inadequacies at the nexus of gender and sexuality and offers some suggestions for theorizing identity categories as relatively coherent cultural iterations while avoiding the hazards of essentialism inherent to an umbrella term like "queer."