March 31, 2006

One night at MC... in drag

By AMY BITELY
arb001@marietta.edu

On Saturday night, Marietta College hosted a drag show full of flamboyant “women” in feathers, high-kicking dance numbers, and general gender-bending good humor. While some members of the audience were content to watch how the performers shifted the line between male and female, I decided to try it myself.

With dress clothes firmly in place, my hair tucked under a fedora, and a mustache and five-o’clock shadow painted on my face, there was only one more element necessary to complete my so-called transformation from man to woman--I had to flatten my chest. With electrical tape in hand and my heart heavy, I began to create a shiny black cage to imprison my female parts.

Girls, do not try this at home. If the sheer agony of being unable to breathe or bend down isn’t enough, then the fact that it will still be sheer agony four days later should deter you for good.

As I cautiously divided my attention between the “ladies” who were dancing onstage and my own total lack of oxygen, I realized that a drag show was the wrong place to try to blur the line between genders. People almost expect a girl in male clothes at a drag show, the same way they expect feather boas and Cher songs, and--oh, right--men in women’s clothes. I wasn’t learning anything new about how men lived by sitting in the audience and thinking about how much my ribs hurt; instead, I was learning a lot about how women dressed.

Today, the issue of clothing doesn’t seem so pressing (both literally and figuratively) as it did back in the early 1900s and previous fashion eras. In those days, women of fashion were supposed to wear girdles and corsets in order to get a slim waistline, which conveniently pushed their internal organs up into their chests or down into their hips and gave these women a real hourglass figure. These women’s corsets were often made of bone and tough fabric so that they would hold their shapes more easily. Women in corsets sometimes reduced their waistlines to eighteen or twenty inches as a result of frequent corset use.

To those who find this idea appealing, you may want to consider that these women were forcing their internal organs out of their abdomens and into their ribcages through corseting. The pain that these women must have suffered puts my own adventure with electrical tape to shame.

The idea of female liberation gets tossed around in academic circles with some degree of frequency--when is a woman really free from oppression? Is it when she earns the same amount of money as men? Is it when she and her husband (or domestic partner of her gender of choice) can decide how to raise their children without worrying about what a mother or father’s role is “supposed” to be? Is it when a woman doesn’t have to have a husband or a wife at all, but is completely sufficient all by herself?

I suppose, in my own opinion, that a woman is free when she doesn’t have to compress her ribcage to be considered beautiful--when sweatpants are considered acceptable clothes for the gym, for the home, and for the classroom. A woman is free when the only reason she could possibly have for mummifying her chest in some restraining device (like electrical tape) is that she wants to make a joke out of pretending to be a man.

Perhaps I’ll one day take my drag show on the road, walking the malls in a fake mustache with my chest taped down flat. Maybe then, I’ll see what the differences are between how men and women are treated, and I’ll find some more full definition of women’s freedom.

In the meantime, though, I will sit back in my comfortable pants, let my hair hang down, and rest my aching ribcage. If the drag queens want to wear beautiful women’s clothing, let ‘em. I’m a liberated girl who doesn’t worry about her figure. If the queens are short on corsets, they can borrow the rest of my electrical tape.