‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ from A Chorus Line is not the kind of song you might expect to hear at a queer, non-mainstream drag show in Seattle. First of all, it's a showtune, and the people onstage and in the audience are mostly lesbians, trans*Footnote 1 folks and bi girls. And everyone knows showtunes are the gay boys’ turf – or, at the very least, they are certainly not a typical soundtrack for an event catering to the hipster crowd that has come out for this ‘drag-lesque’ variety show, an annual benefit staged for the Northwest Network, a non-profit organisation dedicated to eradicating queer domestic violence. Moreover, it's a showtune that advocates plastic surgery, and these are predominantly feminist lesbians, trans* folks and bi girls, many of them also self-identified big girls and bois who have spent a good deal of time onstage and off encouraging people to love their bodies and advocating for more fat acceptance in queer and mainstream society.
And yet, here is Seattle performance troupe Your Gay Lover (a multi-size, multicultural, all-femmeFootnote 2 troupe that supports diversity and whose members consider themselves progressive activists) performing a number to ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’. Five of its members, their faces exquisitely made up and their bodies clad in sweat suits, form a dance line with ‘lead singer’ Scarlet Fever in the middle. Scarlet's ‘back-up dancers’ stretch and preen while she lip-syncs A Chorus Line's Val's vignette about her decision to invest in plastic surgery in order to get more parts. A couple of time steps, a series of jazz hands and one human car later, the performers have stripped down to their skivvies, revealing all their titular assets just as A Chorus Line's Val belts out her final testimonial to silicone over cymbals crashing on the back-beat and swinging, syncopated brass: ‘Tits and ass have changed my life!’
Your Gay Lover is (intentionally) not subtle about the gender critique they are articulating: they exaggerate and mock gender conventions that dismiss a thin woman with a score of ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ until she gets plastic surgery and, therefore, certainly wouldn't welcome this particular troupe of performers. At the same time, ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ is a scorching hot number that powerfully eroticises those bodies that have been coded undesirable. ‘Tits and ass won't get you far – unless they're yours’, Scarlet Fever lip-syncs, but this time the sexy, employable T&A in question is large and unabashedly queer. Moreover, by staging their queer critique to a song that explicitly elucidates the amount of work that even straight, thin, white women must put into the kind of gender presentation that gets acknowledged (and accepted), the performers suggest that gender in particular and identity in general are performative and laboriously produced, rather than natural or innate. In short, Your Gay Lover espouses Val's advice to ‘keep the best of you, “do” the rest of you’, but the troupe applies her philosophy to gender, laying claim to desirable femininity, bumping and grinding against its borders in order to expand it, to expose its limits, even as they find pleasure in it.
Before and especially since Judith Butler argued that drag, among other forms of gender subordination, has the potential to ‘mime and render hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses’ (Butler Reference Butler1993, p. 232, italics in original), queer theorists and performance studies scholars have spilled a great deal of ink on the work that gender performance can do on gender, sex, sexuality and identity politics in general. Meanwhile, music scholars have drawn from queer theories in order to address gender and sexuality in popular music performances. Virtually no scholarly work, however, examines the role of popular music in drag and gender performance or the use of popular music by drag performers.Footnote 3
And yet music is an integral part of most drag performance. Male-to-feminine drag queens, for instance, often make names for themselves as diva impersonators, lip-synching to the likes of Cher, Liza and Tina. Many drag kings have found the boy band phenomenon to be a particularly rich terrain, resulting in the formation of Santa Barbara's Disposable Boy Toyz and the Bay Area's Transformers. And because of its roots in various genres of dance and its emphasis on choreography, movement and corporeality, femme and neo-burlesque performance, too, is intricately tied to musics ranging from the jazzy strains of this century's striptease soundtracks to classic rock, country and hip hop.
Music can serve as the inspiration for a piece or an entire show: Seattle's Von Foxies, for instance, staged a showcase called We Are the Champions: The Von Cock Rock Bonanza in 2007, dedicated to classic and hard rock. And Oakland, California, performer Krista Smith has staged several music-focused incarnations of her drag and burlesque showcase, the Kentucky Fried Woman Show, including a 2008 Wham! Tribute called Make It Big, a 2009 tribute to Dolly Parton (Figure 1), and a 2011 show titled Hippies vs. Ravers that heavily involved the respective musics associated with these social movements. Music also provides structure and rhythm, narrative and nuance for drag pieces. In the number described above, Your Gay Lover builds on the musical cues used to signal sexuality in ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’. They use the bawdy brass and sassily swung beat as inspiration for critically exploring their own bodies onstage, and employ the song's lyrics as the framework for the story their own piece tells.
Flyer from Krista Smith's Kentucky Fried Woman Show's Dolly Parton Tribute. Kentucky Fried Woman appears in the top left corner in the red beehive wig. Image created by StormMiguel Florez, used by permission from Krista Smith.
Performance presents queer drag and burlesque artists with a critical means of staging their own consumption of the music they listen to in their daily lives. Mainstream popular music presents queer audiences with a kind of paradox. On one hand, the history of Western popular music is in many ways a history of sexuality and rebellion, the bold-type moments of which have often involved taboo-transgressing displays of desire and a good deal of genderfucking, from Elvis the Pelvis to eyeliner-friendly emo boys. On the other hand, those queer moments in pop music also end up recuperated into and even recuperating normative conventions that do not allow space for queer acts or queer people. Meanwhile, very few out queer artists have enjoyed widespread success in pop music even as the mainstream music industry has, at various times, attempted to cater to the powerful ‘pink’ dollar.Footnote 4
Drag and gender performance provide LGBT music fans with a rich repertoire of subversive strategies for queering popular music, of clearing space for themselves within an often adamantly heterosexist musical history by critiquing the normative conventions of popular culture and laying claim to music they love. In this essay, I argue that burlesque and femme drag or gender performanceFootnote 5 in particular, with their emphasis on ambivalent corporeality and anti-essentialism, can provide queer artists with a means of reterritorialising popular music with queer bodies and experiences, of interweaving the narratives of familiar songs and artists with their own powerful staged dialogues about queer femininity and desire. Suzanne Cusick once described lesbianism as a non-hierarchical means of organising her relationship to the world and a lesbian relationship with music, then, as ‘an active response – the joining of my body to the music in which “who's on top” keeps changing’ (Cusick Reference Cusick, Brett, Wood and Thomas1994, p. 77), rather than some kind of essentialised aesthetic or sonic preference. Femme, too, is perhaps best defined as a practice, as something one does with and to femininity, a way of looking at and through gender rather than simply looking ‘like a girl’. The engagement of femme gender performers with the music they perform to is similarly active and strategic.
From 2005 until 2009 I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork with femme drag artists and gender performers of femininity in Seattle, the Bay Area (San Francisco and Oakland) and Chicago, locations I chose because they were home to thriving femme performance scenes at the time. This research consisted of observing performances and rehearsals, participating in workshops and conferences geared towards the femme and drag communities, and interviewing performers. Interviews (which were audio-recorded) were conducted either over the phone or in person at a location of the performer's choosing; the interviews consisted of questions about the interviewee's performance background, gender identification, performance ethos, involvement in queer politics, musical tastes, and processes for creating and staging a number. While interviews with audience members and other non-performing participants in these queer communities were a part of my research, the references to audiences I make here are based primarily on performers’ comments to me about their own experiences of the crowds at their shows, the messages they hope to convey, and their own conversations with fans, as well as, to a lesser degree, on my own experiences as a participant-observer at femme drag shows and in femme drag communities in these cities. Building on this research, this essay explores the ways queer performers of femininity draw from femme histories of passing (appearing to be something or someone you are ‘not’) and ambivalence, and build on the resolutely irresolute aesthetics of femme performance to critically perform their own consumption of pop music.
I'm strictly a female female? Femme-ininity and femme drag
The term ‘femme’ at its most basic has historically functioned in queer lexicons as a kind of shorthand for queer female femininity, or for lesbians and bisexual women who ‘look like’ girls. In recent decades, however, femme has been employed by anyone who approaches femininity as a queer/ed identity or performance strategy. In other words, femme for many LGBT people is no longer solely the provenance of cisgender women, but is also often utilised by trans* women and trans* men, gay men, and anyone else who approaches femininity vis-à-vis queerness and for whom femininity resonates as a queer strategy.Footnote 6
Because she presents as feminine, the femme often ‘passes’ for straight, even as her predilection for lipstick or heels makes her stick out in a crowd of baseball caps or softball dykes.Footnote 7 Her ability to pass has often resulted in the femme being indiscernible to and/or strategically ignored by queer and mainstream culture. For many lesbian feminists in the 1970s, the femme was dangerously out of style, a traitor coerced by the patriarchy into a heteronormative game of dress-up and childishly determined to linger in her mother's closet. In the 1980s, the femme's scarlet lipstick made her an easy target in the epic battles over bad girls during the course of the feminist ‘Sex Wars’. And in the 1990s, the femme suddenly found her wardrobe raided by celebrities like Madonna who were scrambling to dabble in lesbian chic.
Femme theorists such as Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh (Reference Duggan, McHugh, Brushwood Rose and Camilleri2002, p. 166), however, have long argued that the femme is ‘Girl-by-Choice’ who ‘refus[es] the fate of “Girl-By-Nature”’. Queerly displaced from the heterosexist gender paradigm, the femme then reappropriates femininity and directs it at inappropriate objects of desire, disrupting the hegemonic connection among femaleness-femininity-heterosexuality. Precisely because femmes pass, because they, as femme scholar Lisa Walker has argued, ‘do not look like what they are’ (Walker Reference Walker1993, p. 869), are not what they look like, and do not use their femininity in the pursuit of heteronormative relationships, femmes constantly exceed and expand both mainstream and queer definitions of ‘lesbian’, ‘feminine’ and ‘woman’, challenging the rules of identity in their very inability to follow them. The femme's passing is not just a matter of masquerade; rather, femme at once embraces and critiques femininity, employing it as an integral part of queer sexual identity. Femme lives both within and outside the strictures and structure of dominant femininity. Because she passes as conventionally feminine without assimilating, femme troubles the gendered boundaries of the various identity categories she holds in tension with each other.
Femme performers take queer femininity as their starting point, revelling in the femme's inconclusiveness in order to pull apart and queerly re-embody notions of gender, sexuality and identity. After years of playing supporting roles in drag king performances and the more mainstream wings of the current burlesque revival, femme performers have begun storming stages across North America with a genre of their own in the last decade. Virtually every event geared towards queer women at Seattle Pride 2006, for instance, featured performances of queer femininity. And in summer 2010, performers from around the world flocked to Oakland to attend the third biennial Femme Conference, which included several performance workshops and two evening showcases of femme drag. Aesthetically, femme gender performers marry the ecdysiast eroticism of burlesque with the colourful camp of drag queening and the radical wit of lesbian theatre in a performative ménage à trois. A femme performer may strip off all her clothes or come onstage naked and saucily pile them back on, piece by piece – or she may never show the audience more than her kneecaps. A femme performer may be costumed as a pop star, a politician or a puppy dog. A femme performance may be sexy, silly, extremely serious – or all three at once. What connects all these incarnations is an investment in the simultaneous celebration and critique of femininity and feminine sexuality. Through various theatrical, choreographic and musical strategies, queer femme drag/gender performance as a genre and a movement works to powerfully re-eroticise bodies that have been coded as undesirable and revel in the subversive inconclusiveness that has historically rendered the femme a problematic enigma.
Similarly, femme performers stage their own ambivalent relationships to popular culture and music, at once critiquing and celebrating artists who are meaningful to them, such as indie aristocrats Modest Mouse, country pop queen Shania Twain, patriarch of pachuco Don Tosti and hip hop king Kanye West. The music to which femme performers stage their numbers functions as a common language among friends; a tactic of aesthetics in an organised assault on essentialism; and a means of queerly reoccupying the pop culture they consume. At once performers and consumers, femme burlesque and drag artists reterritorialise the music they love and move it out of context, using it to structure both their numbers and the queer, activist communities they create with their audiences. The rest of this essay addresses the socio-cultural significance and strategies of gender performers’ engagement with popular music, focusing on the techniques employed by femme drag artists to performatively negotiate their own consumption of the songs they use in their acts.
Let's start at the very beginning: setting the stage
More than a mere soundtrack for striptease, background music for backing that ass up, the musical repertoire femmes use is an integral component of their acts. They use it to build character, communicate with their audiences and shape the dialogues about gender and identity their performances initiate. The creation of a drag piece often starts with a song. Seattle performer Sydney Lewis (a.k.a. Miz Ginger Snapz) says, for example, ‘I start with the music. So it's kind of like, I'll just hear a song and I'll kind of start to jam to it. And then a little story will pop up in my head. And if that happens? Like if that story pops up? I'm like, “that needs to be an act”’ (Interview with author: Lewis Reference Lewis2006). A piece often begins at the point of listening and consumption, then. The relationship of drag performer to music is often one based on fandom, an expression of musical tastes.
Musical tastes and listening practices function as powerful descriptors of identity for consumers, the typical opening gambit, ‘so, what kind of music do you like?’ being a kind of sonic script with which we attempt to establish compatibility and broadcast who we are. This drawing together of listening/consumption, daily life and identity is intensified for gender performers, who use the music they choose to publicly communicate about desire and identity. Music can thus be instrumental in fleshing out a performer's stage persona, helping her to tease out the nuances of the overlap between the performer herself and the character she plays. Gay Lover Megan Gibbard's character Poppycock, for example, has earned quite a reputation for strutting her stuff to indie rock. When I asked her why, she laughed and said,
Because I think Poppycock likes that kind of music! That's the stuff I like to dance to. I don't have any sort of sexual connection to hip hop, I don't have any sexual connection to classic rock, although I like those types of music. But I feel like I can really dance to, like, a Postal Service song … I feel much more comfortable in my character in that type of music. (Interview with author: Gibbard Reference Gibbard2006)
Part of the appeal of indie music for Megan stems from her construction of Poppycock as a naughty nerd who performs what Megan calls ‘smartypants burlesque’ and plays with geeky whiteness, particularly the hipster variety that is so prevalent in indie subcultures. Poppycock is infamous for staging experiments like dramatically masturbating with a lab slide and then examining the spoils of her ‘scientist studies’ under a microscope to the tune of Death Cab for Cutie or the Decembrists. Megan exaggerates the carefully crafted, heavily whitewashed geek chic of the NPR-inati, using This American Life-sanctioned music to theatricalise and playfully pick apart the artifices of that culture's understated wit and bookish authenticity. At the same time, her parody of indie culture and her predilection for indie rock help Megan shape a story arc, drawing a connection between Poppycock, the nerdy femme hussy, and the indie culture Megan enjoys, the music she ‘feels like she can really dance to’.
Engaging with indie rock to craft her character works particularly well for Megan because she lives and primarily performs in Seattle, a city for whose citizens the genre has always seemed a path to nirvana. Performing to regionally relevant artists or genres can help a performer to establish herself, her character or her piece, as part of a local music scene. Gender performers regularly tap into the power music can have to signify particular identities, times and places, drawing on social and cultural semiotics of music in order to shape and structure their pieces, characters and artistic niches. Their performances regularly bank on a shared musical lexicon with their audiences who are, ideally, able to read and understand the narrative references these gender performers use music to make.
I do believe she's got it: finding common ground and a familiar tongue
During a conversation we once had about how and why gender performers choose the music they do, Krista Smith, a performer from the Bay Area, remarked:
It's particularly interesting when you do these like major iconic pop culture music things, the songs that like everybody remembers dancing to in seventh grade or whatever. … Whatever way that that music was represented to us in that time, we can pretty much bet our bottom dollar it did not give our queer identities a space. It didn't give our gendered identities – at least queer gendered identities – a space. And it certainly did not give fat chicks a space. (Interview with author: Smith Reference Smith2006)
Krista performs as Kentucky Fried Woman, a name that refers to both her Southern upbringing in Kentucky and her self-identification as ‘trash’ and as fat. Many of her performances deal with the ways fat and femme overlap for her, drawing on femme strategies of ambivalence to re-eroticise fat bodies. Krista often sets her pieces to familiar, iconic country songs like Confederate Railroad's ‘Trashy Women’ and Hank William's ‘Hey Good Lookin’’, with which she can open a line of communication with her audience. The music she performs to, then, provides Krista's pieces with a kind of common ground, a shared mainstream musical history with which to begin a dialogue about very non-mainstream issues.
The music to which femme gender performers stage their acts often functions as a kind of lingua franca, or perhaps lingua femma, with which they can communicate their gender critiques to their audiences. The performers behind Hogwarts Express: The Musical (Figure 2), an ongoing project Krista was involved in, employ a very particular musical vocabulary and assume their audiences’ fluency in it. As one might guess from the title, Hogwarts Express is a Harry Potter parody, or rather, as director Meredith Fenton described it, ‘a queer, political reimagining of the Harry Potter stories’ first staged a full year before J.K. Rowling ‘outed’ the character of Professor Dumbledore and exposed her own queer subtext. In the hands of this ‘diverse cast of many gendered people’, Hermione Granger (played by Krista) is a chubby femme, and Harry and Ron Weasley are played by drag kings (Meredith, a femme performer who also drag kings, plays Ron).Footnote 8Hogwarts Express weaves issues relevant to queer communities in the United States into the Harry Potter stories: Harry realises that he is in love with Ron and forms a gay–straight alliance with Hermione, which falls apart when Harry railroads the people of colour and trans* folks in the group in favour of his own agenda and ends up collaborating with the ‘Log Cabin Death Eaters’ on a ‘pureblood’ campaign focused entirely on same-sex marriage.
Flyer from Hogwarts Express: The Musical! Image courtesy of Krista Smith.
But these ‘queer reimaginings’ of the Harry Potter characters and themes are not conveyed through dialogue; Hogwarts Express primarily depends on pop music to gesture towards plot lines and to craft their overlapping counter-narrative, carefully selecting pop songs they hope will be meaningful to their audiences. Some of the music used carries a particularly queer currency. Lee Jordan, for example, a peripheral character in the Harry Potter books played here by an African American drag king, gets a solo scene in which he comes out as a trans* woman and rather fabulously transitions into Leah Jordan (complete with tight red rubber dress), to the tune of Chaka Khan's ‘I'm Every Woman’, a beloved gay club anthem. For the most part, however, the Hogwarts Express soundtrack features more generalised pop fare.
Gender performances that employ music as a lingua franca obviously hinge on the assumption that their audience shares a particular musical vocabulary that will lead them to make similar affective assumptions about the song and ‘get’ the joke. Ron and Harry's first love scene in Hogwarts Express, for example, is an awkward, teenage affair that begins with stolen glances, moves on to a furtive game of grab-ass, and ends with Ron hiding his erection behind a book when Hermione walks in and interrupts them. It is set to ‘I Think We're Alone Now’, a song that addresses burgeoning teenaged sexuality and positions it at odds with the rules and regulations of the adult world. Moreover, Hogwarts Express uses the synth-pop version of the song popularised by Tiffany, a popular teen beat artist many of the HE performers admired when they were growing up in the 1980s and one that they are hoping their audience will also associate with their own youthful romances.
Not everyone in the audience will make these associations, because everyone doesn't remember dancing to the same songs in seventh grade, as Krista put it. Musical histories vary widely.Footnote 9 Because of the demographics of the contemporary scene, however, much drag/gender performance presumes a white, middle-class, college-educated, urban-dwelling, mid-twenties-to-mid-thirties locus for its musical lingua franca: 1980s pop metal ‘hair band’ albums are extremely popular source material, for instance, as are the hits of white mainstream pop stars from the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, some of the presumptions gender performers make about the comprehensibility of their musical contexts are based on their engagement with various established repertoires. Gender performance is, by definition, based on the notion of gender as repertoire, as an incessant series of performances that are learned and produced both onstage and off. The notion of a performative repertoire is perhaps even more significant for femme performance because of its relationship to burlesque and other forms of dance. Femme gender performers, therefore, rehearse not only the affects and attributes of particular feminine archetypes (and of femininity in general as archetype), but also a body of erotic choreography.
The genres of gender and movement, narrative and expression practiced by gender performers in general and femme performers in particular are, in part, shaped with and by the music to which they are set. A performer's stylistic repertoire is built with and by the music to which she performs. Thus, Megan from Seattle partially created Poppycock out of indie rock to which she performs, honing an oeuvre of geek chic by assembling a musical repertoire commonly associated with a particular brand of urban whiteness. A gender performer's body of work, then, overlaps with the affective and stylistic semiotics socially associated with a musical scene, and the musical repertoire to which a gender artist performs can become almost synonymous with her or his theatrical repertoire.
At the same time, drag/gender performance repertoires can also produce performance-based categorisations of music, songs that are cognitively and socially grouped together by both performers and in-the-know audience members based on the type of piece with which they are associated. Classic striptease and burlesque have their own musical repertoire, of course – songs that have long been associated with, and often were written for, erotic performance. Tunes like ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ are so historically associated with striptease choreography that neo-burlesque audiences often know what kind of choreography and storylines to expect when they hear them, a knowledge they demonstrate by laughing or clapping at the song's opening strains. But other musics have also become codified into performative genres within today's drag and, especially, neo-burlesque scenes. Within the contemporary femme performance world, the aggressive guitar licks and driving pace of heavy metal, for instance, often signify an assertive, dominant sexuality or an S/M encounter, while the sultry strains of Nina Simone's ‘I'm Feeling Good’ often imply that a hot and heavy piece involving autoeroticism or body-positive sexuality is coming. To some degree, these performative musical repertoires once again develop out of the social meanings already associated with a particular genre or performer. But these bodies of sounds also take on a new, queer significance as they at once help to shape and are categorised and codified by their use in genres of gender performance.
These various overlapping combinations of musical semiotics, genres of gender, traditions of choreography and theatrical styles result in a kind of affective repertoire that gender performers are constantly fine-tuning in order to communicate with queer audiences. When Krista performs to a country song as Kentucky Fried Woman, for instance, she is building on the signifying system the genre encompasses, inviting her audience to jump to the same conclusions and, with her name, aligning herself and her performance with the social meanings American audiences might typically (or stereotypically) make of, say, the hangdog twang of a Hank Williams song. At the same time, Krista also draws from a closet full of queer aesthetic props like campy exaggeration, over-the-top sass and non-normative sexual practices, peppering the musical scenario she borrows (and, subsequently, her own plot) with counter-hegemonic cues. Finally, Krista's choice of music also extends from and reinforces the stylistic significance of country within the contemporary genre of femme performance (in which country is usually used in pieces characterised by a humorous sauciness that take on classically American themes or icons), as well as her own history of pairing country with pieces that deal with fat eroticism.
The musical lingua franca of a drag/gender performance piece, then, becomes part of a richly intertextual language that is densely layered with meaning and context. As fans, gender performers are ‘aggressive participants’, as Julia Kristeva puts it, in the music texts to which they perform. Moreover, fans recognise pop songs as ‘mosaics of quotations’, to use another notion taken from Kristeva (Reference Kristeva and Moi1986, p. 37). Rather than literary references, however, gender performers recognise affective quotations, moments or beats that, for them, refer to other intimate or emotional sources that form a kind of counterpoint to the dominant narrative of the song.Footnote 10 Gender performers then stage these ‘other texts’ located within the music to which they perform. Their pieces, therefore, are a collection of musical, literary, theatrical, stylistic and ideological quotations that at once recontextualise and disrupt the ‘primary’ text (the pop song) they read.Footnote 11 In the process of creating this polyphonic text, they invite their audiences to join them in their ‘aggressive participation’, to read and recognise the quotations that shape it, and to help shape and structure the performative lingua franca with which gender performances speak.
There's a place for us: reterritorialising the repertoire
Many queer people who identify with femme conceive the term as a verb, rather than a noun; it is something one does to – or with – femininity, rather than a fixed identity. When I asked her to explain what femme meant to her, performer Xandra Ibarra (who was living in Seattle at the time of this interview but has since moved to the Bay Area) said, ‘My femmeness is like a way of rolling that's like super-hard so you can see the scars underneath the beauty. I want my femme-ininity to say like I'm cool and collected, but you can tell under my cool and collected that I will just go off on you if you wanna fuck with me’ (Interview with author: Ibarra Reference Ibarra2006). Femme is a means of clearing space – within femininity, within queerness – for new ways of doing femininity (and gender in general) that at once critique heternormativity and expose its construction, but also find joy within the parameters of the very conventions being critiqued.
Similarly, for a femme performer (and for gender performers in general), setting a number to a particular song, artist or genre of music can be a tactic used to elbow her way into social spaces and popular cultures that do not typically make room for the kinds of queerness she wants to perform. Her music can also help a performer expose and expand the boundaries of the identities she is staging. For Xandra, who performs under the name Chica Boom, the music she uses in her performance helps her to map the various trajectories of her femme-ininity in pieces like ‘Mariachi Marimacha’. The title of this piece refers to the music it is set to – the famous mariachi song ‘El Jarabe Tapatío’. But with the word ‘marimacha’, which literally means a macho Maria and colloquially refers to a lesbian, Xandra's title also encompasses her personal relationship with femme, which is layered with her memories of the tough-as-their-nails, expertly made-up cholas she grew up idolising. She says, ‘I'm very feminine, but I'm also very macha. I'm not macho, I'm macha. I feel like Chica Boom in that number is like a strong, feminine presence that could be compared to something macho in a feminine way’ (Interview with author: Ibarra Reference Ibarra2008).
‘El Jarabe’ is a socio-cultural gesture with which Xandra indicates Mexico and her self-identification as ‘Xicana’ (Chicana), but she intends it to take on different meanings for different audiences. When she performs ‘Mariachi Marimacha’ for Mexican and Chicana/o audiences, she reconstructs, onstage, her queer femininity out of a culturally recognisable musical cue, tapping into the rich history of mariachi in order to compel Chicano/a to flex and expand so as to include Xandra's femme-ness. On the other hand, ‘El Jarabe Tapatío’ often translates for Xandra's English-speaking audiences as ‘The Mexican Hat Dance’, a signifier of a generic Mexicanness. Xandra flirts with her own exotification, donning a sombrero and spinning around another one as the bright mariachi horns of that familiar song chase each other around its swirling, twirling melody line. At the same time, she claims ownership of that sexualised representation, seducing her audience with a playful Chicana sexuality that they can look at, even lust after, but that she ultimately controls. Eventually, she physically removes all the trappings of the stereotype, stripping down to panties emblazoned with a Mexican flag.
In short, Xandra's use of ‘El Jarabe’ is an act of musical passing that allows her personal realisation of femme to resonate with diverse communities, even as she critically ‘mistranslates’ their discursive representations of her. Like her costume, she uses the song to invoke and playfully complicate an essentialised notion of ethnicity.Footnote 12 ‘El Jarabe Tapatío’ is the means by which Xandra introduces herself to multiple audiences, putting them at ease with a cultural cue with which they are familiar. But then she does it just a little ‘wrong’ (or perhaps more accurately, overdoes it): by twisting her intertwining performances of ethnicity, gender and sexuality ever so slightly, Xandra showcases for her audience both the limits of their essentialised assumptions about her and the ragged seams of the seemingly solid notions of identity on which those assumptions are based. Meanwhile, Xandra is busily pushing at the edges of multiple identities and communities, using ‘El Jarabe’ to carve out a space in which she can hold onto the aspects of the identity/ies she performs that she likes and complicate and trouble the ones she doesn't.
José Muñoz (Reference Muñoz1999, p. 97) calls this kind of strategic misrecognition ‘the cultural politics of disidentification’, the tactic of performatively reterritorialising seemingly monolithic hegemonic structures, of exploding them from within by ‘inhabiting them with a difference’ (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1999, p. 107). Disrupting the binary of identification and counter-identification, assimilation and diametric opposition, queer disidentificatory performance grafts toxic queerness onto heteronormative paradigms of gender and sexuality, calling into question the coherence of those social structures by consciously and queerly reoccupying them with ‘inappropriate’ bodies. Gender performers like Xandra and Krista often stage complex disidentifications with various socio-cultural categories – Chicana/o, queer, white trash, fat – that allow them to infiltrate seemingly stable identities, identities we think we know, identities whose parameters and particulars we take for granted. The medium of performance allows gender artists to ‘rehearse identities that have been rendered toxic within the dominant public sphere but are … restructured (not yet cleansed) so that they present newly imagined notions of the self and the social’ (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1999, p. 97). The result is a kind of passing that is not necessarily focused on a believable performance, but rather on a ‘tactical misrecognition of self’ that both invokes a racialised, classed and/or gendered archetype and challenges its limit(ation)s. In the process, the performer works to force the audience to balance precariously on the fine line between desire for and distaste towards the Other that forms the boundaries of identity categories – and to acknowledge their discomfort. This problematising of desire is perhaps all the more pronounced and powerful in neo-burlesque performance, which audiences can be assumed to attend with the expectation of being titillated. What the performers offer are a complicated erotics: Xandra, for instance, explicitly, excessively performing the exoticised, eroticised Latina we expect, or Krista layering eating with eroticism and fear of fatness with a fierce, femme sexuality.
Muñoz refers to this kind of performance as ‘terrorist drag’, a modality that differs from the sanitised, desexualised presentation often proffered by commercial and/or mainstream drag. Terrorist drag labours ‘to create critical uneasiness, and, furthermore, to create desire within uneasiness’ (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1999, p. 101). The creation (or, perhaps more accurately, exposure) of this uneasiness is designed to impact gender performance audiences. But it also provides an opportunity for the performers themselves to acknowledge the (often erotic) appeal normalising discourses of heterosexist whiteness and dominant ideologies of Otherness hold even for (and over) minoritarians, even as they critique and recolonise them from within.
Music helps gender performers shape their ‘terrorist drag’, breathing life into the discourses of identity being invoked and then providing the backbone for their meticulous makeovers of those ideologies. At the same time, however, drag/gender performance is also a means by which queer consumers disidentify with the popular music to which they perform. A gender performer's engagement with the music to which she performs is based neither on simple identification with it nor wholesale rejection of its more problematic politics. Rather, many gender performers ‘tactically misrecognise’ the stories behind their songs, the social spaces created by those narratives, and their own places within (or outside) those musical worlds. Drag can be a means of forcing the music performers love, music that doesn't always include or accommodate them, to tell the stories they want to hear.
These kinds of tactical manoeuvres into pop culture territories not their ‘own’ are not always perceived as such by audiences. Xandra, for one, remarked that while she always thinks of her work as very subversive, she often discovers that her white audiences think that she is just ‘pushing the gas on stereotypes’ (Interview with author: Ibarra Reference Ibarra2008). Many performers acknowledge that the most they can do is be as intentional as possible with their pieces. They also stress the personal and social importance of creating pop cultural spaces for the fat chicks, the queers, the non-traditional gender identities – even if the performers themselves are initially the only ones standing in those spaces. Just as femme revels in its own ambivalent relationship to femininity, its ability to pass and thus to queerly trouble the heteronormative parameters of sex, gender and sexuality, femme drag engages a complex disidentification with popular culture, staging the simultaneous critical celebration and queer consumption of music that femme performers enjoy in their personal lives. Like Xandra, who employs music that she loves, compelling it to tell the stories she wants to hear, gender performers wield a performative control over it that allows for enjoyment without assimilation, for consumption without capitulation to the demands of a particularly racialised, classed heteronormativity.
The name on everybody's lips is gonna be … ? Producing consumption, consuming performances
As I have argued throughout this essay, gender performers typically stage their numbers to music they love and listen to regularly – songs that have a particular social, political, cultural and/or personal significance for them. Their performances, therefore, often powerfully embody the pleasure of musical consumption and appreciation. Take, for instance, a piece created by Chicago's JT Newman (who performs as Miss Bea Haven) around Deborah Gibson's mall-pop ballad ‘Lost in Your Eyes’. Assuming a demeanour of nervous self-consciousness, Miss Bea Haven takes the stage behind a lone microphone and proceeds to actually sing Gibson's song in a trembling, feathery soprano. While most femme performers lip-sync, act out or dance to a song, some sing their soundtracks, bridging the gap between karaoke and drag or burlesque. Miss Bea Haven strips while she sings, awkwardly and almost absent-mindedly removing her clothing while she warbles Gibson's tune in the croaking, cracking, high-pitched voice of an adolescent girl. As the song progresses, Bea gains both confidence and volume. By the time she has reached the second chorus, she has tossed off her top, begins belting out melismatic (though still intentionally unpolished) improvisations on the melody, and pulls a handful of rubber eyeballs from her bra. She ends the piece by simulating masturbation with the eyeballs, erotically (but still rather inelegantly) shoving them down her panties as she purrs the final ‘lost in your eyes’ with spent satisfaction.
Miss Bea Haven's piece is obviously meant to be a humorous indulgence in ‘bad’ taste: JT is a seasoned and typically polished performer, acclaimed throughout Chicago for her pretty, witty, and almost always very professional burlesque. Her onstage musical choices range from classic rock to classic bump and grind tunes, but she rarely (if ever) ventures into the ‘guilty pleasure’ terrain where Gibson's 1989 hit lives. And yet there is also an earnestness about the piece, an endearing sense of whimsy, spontaneity and (especially) serious sexual pleasure that seems to point more to a youthful celebrity crush than an excessively irony-laden endeavour to pair ‘bad’ burlesque with ‘bad’ music. In short, JT (who, at age 35 at the time of this performance, was young enough to be a devotee of Deborah's when she was still named ‘Debbie’) seems to be tapping into the moony, moody, irrationally intense energy of adolescent fandom and its kissing cousin, teen sexuality.
Writing about Beatlemania, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs argue that teenage fandom functioned as an ‘act of defiance … [that laid] claim to the active, desiring side of sexual attraction. … To assert an active, powerful sexuality by the tens of thousands and to do so in a way calculated to attract maximum attention was more than rebellious’ (Ehrenreich et al. Reference Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs1986, p. 18, italics in original). Despite, or rather, because of its frenzied, fainting hysterics, adulation of a pop star provides young girls with great influence, not only over an artist's career (as Ehrenreich et al. argue, ‘adulation created stars’) but over heternormative expectations that young women should keep their sexuality in check in the interest of hooking (and holding onto) a potential husband (Ehrenreich et al. Reference Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs1986, p. 36). While that stipulation is not as pressing today as it was in the 1960s, it certainly continues to hold some sway over the lives of teenaged girls, who are still rather stringently corralled into either the Virgin (/girlfriend material) or Whore (/‘troubled’) side of the feminine sexuality dichotomy. Although Ehrenreich et al. write primarily about girls’ desire for male artists, their claims also apply to the screaming masses that greeted female teen beat stars like Gibson on her mall tours and plastered their lockers with her photos. Regardless of the object, teenage fandom constitutes a unique and often subversive power that is predicated upon homosocial bonding and unapologetic feminine sexuality.Footnote 13
Drag performers take up the formidable energy of fandom, calling into question conventions of musical power and authenticity wherein creation is privileged and consumption in general and especially feminine and/or female consumers in particular are consistently devalued. Gender-performance-qua-fandom troubles the divide between producer and consumer even further, however, because these ‘fans’ are actively and often transgressively performing their own consumption of the music they enjoy and the artists they emulate. In his article on New York's Night of a Thousand Stevies, Jason Lee Oakes argues that the performances by Stevie Nicks impersonators at these events ‘straddl[e] usually strict divisions between star and fan, live and mediated, production and consumption, and fantasy and reality’ (Oakes Reference Oakes, Whiteley and Rycenga2006, p. 47). For Oakes, all this straddling results in a series of ‘ambiguities that overlap and intermingle with the realm of gender and sexuality’ (Oakes Reference Oakes, Whiteley and Rycenga2006) as performers forge a multiple, shifting relationship with music, a ‘queer’ middle ground that subverts established boundaries on multiple fronts. Gender performers similarly destabilise the categories that delineate popular music, troubling and toying with codified musical roles. But whereas Oakes reads straddling as indefinite, ‘ambiguous’, I am arguing that, perhaps especially for femme performers, this kind of legwork is about firmly (but not fixedly) planting a fastidiously pedicured foot in more than one spot. When femme performers similarly spread their legs, they are staking a bodily claim, locating themselves in more than one role at the same time, even as they performatively resist limiting themselves to the positions they have taken up, drawing on femme epistemologies of and experiences with the social in order to articulate a powerful, tactical ambivalence.
Femme-ininity at once passes as and refuses to assimilate within the constraints of dominant femininity, highlighting the permeability of seemingly fixed boundaries of identity even as it harnesses the strength of both sides of that divide. Similarly, femme gender performers disturb the coherence of dichotomous musical roles, polarisations that have also been historically, heteronormatively gendered. Rather than limiting their relationship with music to either ‘active’ producer, a role that carries with it the authority of a heavily patriarchal notion of authenticity, or ‘passive’ consumer, which comes laden with connotations of materialism and mindless compliance, femme gender performers act as both simultaneously, reinhabiting consumerism as producers and, in turn, ‘passing’ as producers without ever singing or playing a note. Xandra Ibarra/Chica Boom, for example, builds her acts out of her history as a musical consumer, drawing on the mariachi music she grew up listening to. At the same time, although she may not form the notes to ‘Jarabe’, she is playing it, passing as the passive consumer even as she uses her performance to control the music, including its meanings, coaxing, cajoling, teasing queer narratives out of it.
Xandra's personal investment in ‘Jarabe’ – her desire to at once share the music she loves with her audiences and use those songs to signify an empowered, queer, Chicana sexuality – speaks to the ways in which gender performers-cum-consumers actively participate in the development of multiple, overlapping popular cultures. As John Fiske (Reference Fiske and Lewis1992, p. 37) has argued, consumers contribute to the ‘semiotic productivity’ of popular culture by making ‘meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural commodity’. Diehard devotees often take this engagement a step further, building on popular culture to create new texts and cultural products that speak to and define their own fan communities, such as the full-length novels written by Star Trek fans and YouTube ‘spin-off’ videos created by devotees of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars. These original products at once pay homage to and shift the focus of the objects (and subjects) of fans’ admiration, infusing the products and performances they love with fans’ personal style and concentrating on the aspects of popular culture that appeal to consumers rather than producers. Henry Jenkins describes these original ‘fan texts’ as a type of ‘textual poaching … a strategy for appropriating materials produced by the dominant culture industry and reworking them into terms which better serve subordinate or subcultural interests’ (Jenkins Reference Jenkins1992, p. 215).
Drag/gender performances also constitute a kind of ‘textual poaching’, expropriating beloved pop songs in order to create new narratives that speak to the politics and principles of subcultural communities. These ‘fan texts’, however, exceed genre boundaries. The dancers in Your Gay Lover, for example, are certainly fans of the musical theatre soundtracks to which they sometimes perform, but they do not limit themselves to that particular repertoire. Becca Wisotsky (a.k.a. Bad News Bettie), who appeared in the ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’ number, says,
I love show tunes. I don't necessarily want to do every number to a show tune, but they're really fun. I think that that's the great thing about the group is that your vision is pretty much is open to whatever. It wasn't like, ‘we are a show tunes group’. But I can see people wanting to do more show tunes just because it's fun to genderfuck with them. (Interview with author: Wisotsky Reference Wisotsky2009)
Rather than the kind of music they listen to, then, the focus in these communities of consumers is on what they do to and with the songs that they perform, the ways they can ‘genderfuck’ with the music they love.
Like femme, an identification based on what one does to or with femininity and identity rather than a unifying essence, gender performance as consumption is about action rather than affinity. It is a means of critically engaging with popular music and then using those socially reconstituted sounds and sentiments to build politically, ideologically compatible communities of queer consumers. Femme gender performers in particular corporeally stage both the joy and pain of queer consumerism in performances like JT's, which embody the often-overlooked strength and sexual energy of fandom in every shimmy and shake. At the same time, these performances of fandom also physically and forcibly demand an active, empowered role in its production. Their fan texts are written on and with their bodies, reliving but also rewriting the music they've loved and their shifting relationship to it.
We made a lot of music dancing: staking claims, embodying dissonance
As they rework and rewrite the songs to which they perform, gender performers are negotiating a position of control over the pop cultural discourses that inform and impact their lives. More than just narrative negotiations, however, their performances often constitute a corporeal claim on the music they love. Femme gender performers use movement and dance to articulate a bodily connection to and control over the music they listen to in their daily lives, linking the beat of a song to the bumping and grinding of their bodies.
One of the most impressive executors of this corporeal connection between gender performer and music is Chicago's Mae the Bellydancer. In a 2008 piece set to the Dresden Dolls’ ‘Missed Me’, for instance, she matches nearly every beat with a physical movement: tiny shakes of the buttocks, hip rolls, pelvis thrusts. The song lends itself to this kind of enactment; it is slow and percussive, featuring only a singer, whose vocals are almost entirely syllabic, and piano, which emphasises the downbeats but also accents each off-beat with a single note or chord. Mae also picks up on the song's subtler phrasing, however, responding to louder dynamics with larger movements, pairing the dissonant clusters of high notes that end each verse with coy little looks or hip pops, and at times downplaying the predominant percussiveness of the melody in order to draw out the rumbling, rolling notes occasionally sounded in the piano's lower keys with a full body roll.
Mae's particular choreographic choices are undoubtedly the result of her belly dance training, which informs not only her more classically belly dance numbers but also her burlesque-oriented work. Her intricate engagement with the music to which she performs, however, exemplifies the close relationship many femme gender performers cultivate with a song's harmonies, melodies and rhythms, as well as its lyrics. It is a relationship born of hours spent committing beats and phrasing to both cognitive and muscle memory, but also of a careful, intimate, full-body practice of listening.
In her examination of gay clubs in New York, Fiona Buckland (Reference Buckland2002) argues that dancers on the floor provide a visual realisation of the music they are moving to, generating a performance of the song that at once responds to and transforms its rhythmic and melodic structure. ‘The beat not only penetrated the dancer; dancers penetrated the beat, inserting their kinespheres into it’, she writes, detailing what she calls the ‘compositional’ strategies with which individual dancers disrupted the musical plot on the track: accentuating background elements, layering steady beats with syncopated dance moves, and creating repeated kinaesthetic motifs that emphasised the pleasure taken in their own movement (Buckland Reference Buckland2002, p. 79). In pieces like Mae's ‘Missed Me’, the compositional connection between dancer or gender performer and music is so close that it almost becomes ambiguous to the viewer: is the dancer responding to the song? Is she anticipating it? Or is she somehow governing the overarching structure and nuanced details, performatively compelling the song to sound different and her audience to hear it the way she does?
I have devoted much of this essay to the textual relationship of drag/gender performance to popular music, the ways queer performance artists build on and/or co-opt the plot of a tune or the discourse of a musical genre or scene. However, gender performers also engage with the songs they perform on a more strictly musical level, applying the textual practices discussed earlier to musical narratives and adopting the choreographic and corporeal strategies with which a dancer uses to approach a piece of music. For femme performers, this kinaesthetic connection to the sonic texture of the music to which they perform is, to some degree, facilitated by the aesthetic overlap between popular music and burlesque. Burlesque performance uses many of the same structural and stylistic elements as pop songs and performances: repeated riffs and motifs (such as hips shakes and pelvis thrusts), short segments that build and then release (the slow unbuttoning of a shirt or the prolonged removal of gloves, finger by finger) and, especially, a dramatic final climax (which, in classic burlesque choreography, is typically realised by ‘twirling’ – gyrating the breasts so that tassels affixed to the nipples spin).
Some of these parallels can be traced to the 19th-century origins of the American genre of burlesque upon which most neo-burlesque and burlesque-influenced femme performance builds, which developed around the same time as many of the conventions that continue to inform American popular music were being defined. The style and many of the stock movements of burlesque were, thus, undoubtedly shaped by and within the parameters of the music that was available for this kind of performance. Moreover, because erotic performance (or at least the threat of it) infiltrated nearly all the burgeoning forms of entertainment that were contributing to the establishment of a particularly American popular culture during this period, American popular music was perhaps indelibly sutured to sexuality and to the aesthetics and politics of genres like burlesque that constituted an attempt to create and codify a body of movements and mannerisms that would both simulate sexual practices and recognisably enact desire.
The connection between burlesque and popular music is one that many femme gender performers are at least intuitively aware of, and they often exploit the similarities between their choreography and the music to which they perform, using their movements to trip up and transform the flow of the song. In ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’, for example, Your Gay Lover beats the song to the punch, stripping off their tops before the song reaches the climax of its first big chorus. By the time a ribald trombone heralds the singer's conclusion that surgically enhanced tits and ass have changed her life, the Gay Lovers have already spent a full 20 seconds topless, extolling the virtues of their own considerable assets to the madly cheering crowd, which no longer knows or cares what Marvin Hamlisch, Edward Kleban or A Chorus Line's Val has to say about thin, conventionally bodied T&A.Footnote 14 Like the dancers Buckland observed, femme gender performers like Your Gay Lover commandeer popular music, staging their own delight in and consumption of it even as they compel it to perform differently by colonising it with queer bodies and crafting a queer soundscape out of its sonic and stylistic elements.
Rather than a hostile takeover or even a declaration of ownership, however, the claim gender performers in general and femme performers in particular are staking in popular music is one of participation. Rather than insisting on complete control over the songs to which they perform, they are demanding a role in the ‘semiotic productivity’ of popular cultures that is meaningful to them. In a sense, they are attempting to highlight and even celebrate, but also to performatively create, what Charles Keil calls ‘participatory discrepancies’ of music, the slight ‘out of syncness’ that ‘creates the groove and invites us to participate’ (Keil Reference Keil, Feld and Feld2005, p. 98). Keil argues that musical meaning and feeling are ‘continually improvised’ (Keil Reference Keil, Feld and Feld2005, p. 107) and that it is by attending to these discrepancies, rather than attempting to foist a structural cohesiveness or fixed meaning upon song or sound, that we can best understand the power and pleasure of music.
Keil's claim about musical performance is almost uncannily akin to some of the arguments Butler (Reference Butler1993) makes about identity in her theory of gender performativity, which has proven so influential for queer performance artists. Like Keil, Butler locates both power and pleasure, critique and celebration in the cracks and slippages, in the ‘out of syncness’ of a system predicated upon the appearance of fixity and impenetrability. Gender is not the natural outcome of sex, she argues; rather, sex and gender constantly produce each other via the subconscious, non-theatrical and yet performative citation of both their innateness and their relationship to each other. Sex and gender are, thus, naturalised through the reiteration of their naturalness but, paradoxically, they are also perpetually destabilised by this dependence on repetition: ‘It is by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm’ (Butler Reference Butler1993, p. 10). Drag and other forms of ‘gender insubordination’, Butler argues, can powerfully wallow in these gaps and fissures, troubling the cohesiveness of systems of gender, sex and identity and highlighting their ‘flaws’ and failures.
Performances like Your Gay Lover's ‘Dance Ten, Looks Three’, Chica Boom's ‘Mariachi Marimacha’, and the other numbers I have described here play upon and with the participatory discrepancies, the gaps and fissures in both identity and popular music. These pieces constitute both a cognitive and musical dissonance, a powerful counterpoint that refuses to allow dominant cultural discourses to function as closed signifying systems. Rather than claiming ownership or articulating a purely oppositional resistance, gender performers work on and constantly rework the social and aesthetic meanings of both the popular music they love and the identifications that resonate for them. In the process, they invite their audiences to participate with them in this process of semiotic production.
Life is a cabaret: queer time, queer rhythms
In Cusick's ‘lesbian relationship with music’, pleasure comes from a determinedly undetermined power dynamic relationship between music and listener or player, a lack of clarity (or at least fixity) with regards to just which party is in control of the relationship, a perpetual ‘jumbling of who's on top’ (Cusick Reference Cusick, Brett, Wood and Thomas1994, p. 78). She writes, ‘In all performances that give me joy, the answer is unclear – we are both on top, both on our backs, both wholly ourselves and wholly mingled with each other. Power circulates freely across porous boundaries; the categories player and played, lover and beloved, dissolve’ (Cusick Reference Cusick, Brett, Wood and Thomas1994). Drag/gender performances are theatrical stagings of this kind of ambiguous, ambivalent connection to popular music many queer consumers experience. The distinction between various dichotomies – consumer and producer, creation and consumption, submission and control – becomes less stable as each side is queerly reoccupied by performers who powerfully embody the tension between these poles. Gender performers compel the music they love to open up and make room for the stories they want to tell but, at the same time, they also leave themselves open, susceptible to both the pleasure and the pain of a popular culture that consistently works to proscribe them.
Femme performers are particularly receptive to this kind of shifting relationship with music because both their lived experiences and their gender identifications are steeped in ambivalence, in the near-oxymoronic tensions of queer femininity. Writing about femme sexuality, Joan Nestle (Reference Nestle1987) ‘tactically misrecognises’ (to borrow José Muñoz's term) the relationship between dominance and submission, arguing that the bottom gives her insides to the top, but the top gives pleasure to the bottom; the top takes the bottom, but the bottom takes her lover's hand inside her. Similarly, femme reinhabits femininity, ‘doing’ it differently and reworking the power dynamics of gender and sexuality so that girlish figures are queerly reconfigured.
This strategic ambivalence carries over into femme gender performers’ engagements with popular music, wherein the homoerotic undertones of cock rock are unearthed, a high-femme torch song is built from the twang of a country troubadour, and the sonic structure and lyrical semiotics of mariachi and musical theatre are tripped up and re-choreographed. Gender performance documents a refusal to allow musical meaning to become codified and canonised, neither frozen in the history of expectation nor locked into a predetermined progression towards an inevitable conclusion. To a degree, gender performers play on what is perhaps a defining characteristic of popular music, what Simon Frith describes as ‘the importance in music of the “now”, an experience of the continuous present’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 148). ‘To dance’, Frith writes, ‘is not just to experience music as time, it is also to experience time as music, as something marked off as more intense, more interesting, more pleasurable than “real” time’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 156). Gender performers home in on this continuous present, ‘hold[ing] consumption at the moment of desire’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 156), revelling in the visceral, kinaesthetic pleasures of music, and underscoring the textures and nuances of a song that might otherwise be overlooked.
Paradoxically, this emphasis on the continuous present in queer engagements with music allows queer consumers to imagine and create multiple futures – or at least a future beyond and outside of the heternormative rhythm of life. Judith Halberstam argues that queer subcultures produce ‘alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2005, p. 2). Lives lived, as queer lives so often are, in rapid bursts and an insistence upon the here and now – on this party, this dance, this sexual encounter, this drug-induced moment – threaten the normative clockwork of long periods of stability, labour and capital accumulation, and inevitable, linear progressions of time. These queer temporalities shift the focus of life to emotions and ephemera, to the edges of social spaces and the liminalities of experience, which in turn allows queer subcultures to imagine other possible futures.
I am arguing that drag/gender performances like the ones I have described here mark out a kind of queer musical time, one that dwells on and in the continuous present of popular music in order to stage performative interruptions in heteronormative temporalities, but also draws out the liminal or ephemeral in the songs that queer consumers love in order to compel them to speak to the realities of queer lives and ideologies. Deborah Wong has written about the importance of theorising listening and reception as a means of cultural production for communities who remain grossly under- or misrepresented in popular music, arguing that listening practices constitute a ‘crucial interstice for commodity capitalism and subject formation’ (Wong Reference Wong2001, p. 366). Gender performers address and work to rectify the elision of queer people and queer experiences from popular culture by actively staging their own consumption of the music they love. The queer time kept by and in their performances creates temporal and aesthetic spaces in which other meanings, other futures, and other relationships with popular music and identity might be imagined.
