This dissertation focuses on exploring the art of drag as a form of challenging social-political structures. It has a post-structuralist approach, which analyzes the construction of gender as a concept, how cultural productions can help to create ruptures in society and what role the individual's agency has over this transgression. This theory is then seen in practice through the drag performance, and specifically, through considering the career, agency, and production of the drag queen Pabllo Vittar.
Introduction
How and why is the art of drag transgressive? Does it replicate gender norms? Or does it challenge gender performance? The drag universe is broad and complex. Due to its increasing popularity, it has been at the center of discussions in and out of the LGBTQ+ community. Considering the complexity and diversity of drag and the multiple impacts it has had on society, this dissertation will focus on analyzing a specific phenomenon in the drag movement: how it moved from marginal to the mainstream.
More specifically, this work aims to answer what are the social apparatuses drag queens used to make this transition. I'll be looking at this phenomenon with a post-structuralist approach, and finding ways to use these theories to understand our contemporary reality. To make a more in-depth study, I decided to focus mainly on drag performers that are men doing female impersonations, and analyzing the role they have as individuals over their artistic productions. My case study is the famous Brazilian drag queen Pabllo Vittar, and I'll consider her cultural production and integration into mainstream culture.
This specific subject within the drag community interests me as a creative because it allows me to explore minorities' representation and production in popular culture, through the lens of performance. As someone who is an active agent in producing creative work under the influence of societal power structures, I'd like to understand how drag as cultural production reflects issues regarding representation, agency, production, and the permeability of subcultures in mainstream culture. As an individual in society, I believe this study will help me understand how marginal cultures exist in society and how they can contribute to structural changes.
To lay out the theoretical framework of this dissertation, the first chapter Gender Identity & Subjectivity outlines the post-structuralist approach that this study has, going into key concepts — developed mainly by Michael Foucault — about subject and subjectivity in modern-day society. These concepts are the basis for the reader to understand how sexuality was constructed and, consequently, how gender was constructed and is performed — according to the work of Judith Butler.
Still following Foucault's approach, the following chapter, Production and Agency, is focused on understanding how one can use freedom to have agency in cultural production inside a post-structuralist society. The chapter also examines the social apparatuses, described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, that explain the assimilation of marginal symbols and icons into mainstream culture.
The third chapter gives a brief historical context of drag and how this art form puts into practice issues of gender performance, production, and agency described in the past chapters. This section also analyzes LGBTQ+ figures in Brazilian culture that preceded Pabllo Vittar, describing their role of transgression and representation for the community.
The fourth chapter will go over the career, performance, production, and agency of Pabllo Vittar, showing how they used the social apparatuses previously defined to reach popular culture. There is also a comparison between Pabllo and two other Brazilian drag queens that began their careers at similar times and with whom Vittar shares a similar aesthetic. This observation will allow the reader to understand how the use of certain visual symbols, styles, and identities can help — or not — for a subculture to be permeable in mainstream society. In the end, the chapter studies how Pabllo's performance is or isn't transgressive and how it contributes to structural changes.
Finally, it is important to mention that this text will use the term LGBTQ+, instead of queer, because it recognizes the individual identification one can have (either as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or/and trans), and has been taught to identify with by power structures that will be described in the first chapter. Nonetheless, the term LGBTQ+ does not fail to include those who agree with a more unifying approach to identity movements, present in the Q for queer and the +.
Chapter 1: Gender Identity & Subjectivity
"We're all born naked and the rest is drag."
The quote above was coined by the famous drag queen RuPaul (2014). It encapsulates very well the idea that this first chapter introduces concerning gender performance and its implications. However, it is important to understand the context and theoretical framework where these ideas emerged — way before any reality TV show.
Post-Structuralism and the Subject: In the 1970s, society was coping with a big rupture of paradigms that emerged from the counterculture movements from the 1960s. Up until this point, structuralist theories, which analyzed macro structures in society — such as the economy and social classes — were very popular amongst scholars. However, the counterculture groups and the rise of identity movements (e.g. Stonewall, Second Wave Feminism, Black Panthers) brought to light the inability of structuralist theories in dealing with topics that require closer attention to the diversity that exists in society. From these observations, the post-structuralist movement began. Judith Butler (1990) defined this philosophical movement as one that rejects the totality and universality of binary structures, which operate to silence the ambiguity and plurality of language and culture.
One of the theses on which post-structuralist thought bases itself (Craig, 2005) is that no system can be self-sufficient in the way that structuralism suggests. Michael Foucault challenges this structuralist assumption by reintroducing the concept of subject and subjectivity. Foucault (1994, p. 10) argues that in modern society, the subject is a rational active agent, with political rights and moral responsibilities, existing within a society organized by power relations. This means that the system is not self-sufficient, but operates in a way in which subjects collaborate for its maintenance — and what guarantees this is power. According to Foucault, power is a productive force, not to be confused with oppression or domination. The process in which power creates subjectivities is defined by Foucault as assujettissement.
Subjectivity and sexuality: In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1979), Foucault investigates the origins of society's notions around sexuality, identifying it as a topic of interest from the 17th century onward. Through assujettissement, a new subjectivity is created, one which subjects are given the option to identify with or not — though this choice is not inherited, but fabricated. Neither sexuality nor gender has any biological or 'natural' grounds; both concepts use the body's materiality to attach a social construction.
Gender construction and performance: Judith Butler (1988) uses Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir to develop her theories around gender, citing Beauvoir's famous quote "One is not born, but, rather becomes a woman" to exemplify how gender is not a stable identity, but constructed in time through stylized repetition of acts. Butler (1988, p. 526) compares the stylized repetition of acts by which individuals perform gender to a role that an actor plays: "Gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again." Returning to RuPaul's quote, Butler argues that the transvestite figure doesn't only make explicit the difference between sex and gender, but also challenges the difference between appearance and reality: if the reality of gender is dependent on performance, then there's no distinction between what is real and what is performed. It's all drag.
Chapter 2: Production & Agency
This chapter expands the discussion to a larger socio-cultural context, examining cultural production in a post-structuralist society and the agency the individual has over it.
As Butler (1988) has described, to perform the female gender, one must use a series of symbols and gestures corresponding to what society identifies as "woman". Some drag queens, who do a female impersonation in their act, use these same apparatuses to create this illusion. The collectiveness of the audiovisual symbols and social behaviors that communicate the idea of a woman is described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, p.257) as an assemblage — an organization of elements that together possess a capacity, such as the capacity to perform womanhood. An assemblage is not preceded by a particular concept, and its meaning and components are not fixed; the elements that compose an assemblage are combined and de-combined according to variable values, subjectivities, and dogmas of a society in a given time and space.
As the authors clarify (1987, p. 406): "We will call assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow-selected, organized, stratified in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention."
The dissertation continues with further chapters on drag's historical context, Brazilian LGBTQ+ figures, and a full case study of Pabllo Vittar's career — read the complete piece here.
