The problem with the analysis of drag as only misogyny is, of course, that it figures male-to-female transsexuality, cross-dressing, and drag as male homosexual activities – which they are not always – and it further diagnises male homosexuality as rooted in misogyny. The feminist analysis this makes male homosexuality about women, and one might argue that at its extreme, this kind of analysis is in fact a colonization in reverse, a way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity (and thus to reinscribe the heterosexual matrix, paradoxically, at the heart of the radical feminist position). Such an accusation follows the same kind of logic as those homophobic remarks that often follow upon the discovery that one is a lesbian: a lesbian is one who must have had a bad experience with men, or who has not yet found the right one… according to these views, drag is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of “women,” and hence fundamentally based in a misogyny, a hatred of women, and lesbianism is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of men, and so fundamentally a matter of hating men – misandry.”
Judith Butler, Gender is Burning
Butler boldly compares the radical feminist argument against drag and cross-dressing to homophobic arguments against the legitimacy of the lesbian identity in direct response to the type of argument that bell hooks made against the “spectacle” of womanhood portrayed in Paris is Burning. Butler seeks to challenge the positions of the more radical members of her largely feminist audience by comparing them to the positions of the reactionaries who stand for everything they despise. She intentionally presents both arguments with similar sentence structures to show how the same thought process leads to seemingly similar conclusions. Both radical feminists and homophobic reactionaries place hatred or bitterness at the core of queer behavior rather than love. Male homosexuality and lesbianism are therefore the results of a rejection of our “natural” heterosexual natures.
In the case of Paris is Burning, Butler has a better grasp of the concept of intersectionality than many of the film’s critics. She challenges the radical feminist notion that expressions of femininity from trans women or homosexual men come from a place of male privilege or misogynistic derision. Rather, cisgender radical feminists (and even cisgender lesbian radical feminists) are often in a place of higher privilege than the Black and Latinx trans women who appear in Paris is Burning, despite their biological sex. Perhaps such an argument could have influenced the character of Diane in Small Beauty. Despite being a lesbian herself, Diane refuses to acknowledge Mei’s identity as a trans woman, even going as far as to cite examples of “men” trying to “stay in women’s spaces.” Diane, seeing things through a hegemonic heterosexual and gender-essentialist paradigm, unwittingly sides with the very people who have oppressed her.
My “key” for this passage was Butler’s parenthetical assertation that the feminist position on drag and trans women was placing the heterosexual matrix at the center of their position. It shows how insidiously hegemonic cultural beliefs on identity can find their way into our beliefs, no matter how far removed from cisgender heterosexual white male society we think we are.
My “lock” involves Butler’s portrayal of the radical feminist position as lumping together cross-dressing, male-to-female transgenderism, drag, and male homosexuality in general under one big umbrella. Do radical feminists (or did they at the time) truly conflate identity (homosexuality/transgenderism) with behavior (drag, cross-dressing)? Is it the identity that they see as inherently misogynistic or the behavior?