I'm reading Judith Halberstam's book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. In a chapter called, "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings," she builds on Esther Newton's Mother Camp(1979)--which asserts drag queen performances as a critical root of camp, in which the distance between femaleness and femininity is typically highlighted and ironized and gender is denaturalized--and argues for a drag king root to what she calls "king comedy," or "kinging," i.e., performances where "male fragility or male stupidity has been tapped as a primary source of humor" (129). (Laurel and Hardy, Lewis and Martin, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen classicly play in this realm).
Halberstam argues: "Whereas camp reads dominant culture at a slant and mimics dominant forms of femininity to produce and ratify alternative drag feminities that revel in irony, sarcasm, inversion, and insult, kinging reads dominant male masculinity and explodes its effects through exaggeration, parody, and the methods of drag king performance" (131). Both camp and kinging work not through a direct cause/effect but through "indirect and mediated influence" (150).
She suggests that King comedy in particular tends to find humor rather than tragedy in small penises and male vulnerability/powerlessness; it becomes a place where castration anxiety is comic rather than tragic. What's interesting to her about the first Austin Powers movie and The Full Monty (both hit the US, anyway, in 1997, she notes-she discusses American reception/readings of them, too), is that, unlike in many sort of "overgrown boy" comedies (Adam Sandler, Jim Carey, usually tamed into "adulthood" by a het. female romance), "the comic heroes are struggling neither to resist adulthood nor to achieve it; on the contrary, in both films, our heroes have become men and have discovered that manhood does not allay the fear of castration--it confirms it" (136).
I'm not sure if other people are interested in this argument, but I found it an interesting revision of the standard notion of camp. Although they may not be totally subversive in any way, she concludes: "we can at least take comfort in the fact that AP, the Full Monty, and other king comedies have borrowed liberally from butch, nonmale, or penisless models of masculinity. They have also resigned themselves to a world in which the phallus is always fake, the penis is always too small, and the injunction to the masculine subject is not to 'be' but to 'behave.' The work that falls to us, then, is to constantly recall the debts that the successful king comedies would rather forget--in other words, to remember that behind every good king comedy is a great drag king" (151).
BUT, I want to say: wait! Isn't that always still, then the way? The drag king cannot herself parody masculinity (too threatening, I suppose?), but requires a male in male drag, but a drag queen can parody feminity and it's called "camp"--kitschy and funny and...
I hope this isn't too headshoppy for a Sunday. |
