Drag has a long history of existence, but the past is most certainly not what comes to mind when we hear or see the word "drag" today. For most people, the vision of drag is very modern, with men in elaborate dresses (or skirts), makeup, and wigs, which really began in the 1950s and 1960s according to Moncrieff and Lienard (2017). Drag in history is much broader, and reaches back not only to the early 20th century, not only to the Renaissance (hello Shakespeare), but all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, where the tradition of men playing female roles began (Case, 1985).
Throughout time, drag - even theatrical drag - has been a tool for dismantling the social constructions of gender and sexuality. Drag queens have many roles in greater social schemes than their performances, including establishing a category of identity, building a subgroup within the LGBTQ+ community, and serving as activists for LGBTQ, Feminist, and Queer movements. To some extent, drag also contributes to destabilizing the concepts of race and class (Horowitz, 2013).
Feminist perspectives on classical plays and literature have sparked analysis and critique of Athenian (Greek), Roman, and Elizabethan (Renaissance) texts by male writers and playwrights, which lack roles for “actual women” (Case, 1985). Through the folklore of plays and literature, a folk group was formed to enforce patriarchal ideology. As folk groups have common values (Sims and Stephens, 2011), theatre allowed the creation of a new gender role “Woman,” which also formed the drag folk group. This gender was “constructed [to emphasize] categories of difference and polarity” (Case, 1985). Case describes how it was more than common practice to utilize depictions not of actual women, but “a fiction of women constructed by the patriarchy,” using the example of the Amazons to explain that men in drag signified the failure of women to successfully flip gender roles, thereby using this new gender category to display “correct” womanhood by enforcing a “new image of ‘Woman’”.
What is interesting about the creation of this new gender category as a means to satisfy theatrical needs, is that the performativity of idealized womanhood only reinforced the patriarchal construction of gender as an identity category. The new image of womanhood created through this folk group utilized representations of women via dress, gesture, movement, and vocal intonation, the portrayals of which “remained alien to [real] female experience” in behavior, appearance, and formal distance from the representation of the male (Case, 1985).
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