Imitation and Gender Insubordination

Abstract

Drag constituted the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself. Reconsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. In the sense, the 'reality' of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations. The more that 'act' is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory.

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