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Negative Effects Of Drag Kings

Decent Essays

Drag performers take on the look and mannerisms of their opposite gender as a way to entertain and inform their audiences of social issues that can be addressed with humor. Fortunately for the drag community, there has been a recent increase in the popularity of drag queens since the TV show, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” won an Emmy in 2015. However, the female equivalent, drag kings, are given little media attention, thus casting them into obscurity. I argue that the lack of positive media coverage of drag kings in television, advertising, and social media, further isolates drag kings from potential viewers and their fellow LGBTQA community, causing strife for individual performers and their respective performing groups, and furthermore, depriving …show more content…

These negative affects come in the form of both external discrimination taken from outdated social norms and internal struggles within the drag community for equal power and recognition. Colleen Ayoup and Julie Podmore’s article, “Making Kings,” depicts one negative affect drag kings experience as being referred to as the female version of drag queens, thus reducing what could be a self-sufficient subculture to a mere extension of a pre-existing subculture and by devaluing the differences drag kings bring to their community, (64). Some of this isolation comes from an internal divide within the drag community between gay drag queens and lesbian drag kings. As mentioned earlier, companies like World of Wonder feature gay drag kings over drag kings of any sexual orientation. This is due in part to a pre-existing divide between the two genders, with female drag kings seen as a threat to the power possessed by male drag queens, as defined in Steven Schacht’s article, “Lesbian Drag Kings And The Feminine Embodiment Of The Masculine” (82). The outcasting power dynamic between drag kings and drag kings is only made worse by the weak bond between heterosexual and lesbian drag …show more content…

Despite gaining a recent presence on Youtube, lesbian drag kings suffer the most from this exclusion, facing adversity from overly dominant drag queens and their heterosexual drag king counterparts. However, that does not deter these performers from challenging tough issues such as race identity and hyper-masculinity with humor. Inclusion of these comical yet thought-provoking acts is needed in this male dominant society, as they inspire healing for the audience and performer

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