Hello All! So my rock obsessions have jumped around due to lack of information. I wanted to educate more about drag culture in Asia, but I wasn’t successful in finding that much information. So in this post I will throw as much as I can find…at you!
Drag Queen
The etymology of the term “drag queen” is disputed. The term drag queen occurred in Polari, a subset of English slang that was popular in some gay communities in the early part of the 20th century. Its first recorded use to refer to actors dressed in women’s clothing is from 1870.
A folk etymology, whose acronym basis reveals the late 20th-century bias, would make “drag” an abbreviation of “Dressed as A Girl” in description of male theatrical cross-dressing. However, there is no trace of this supposed stage direction in Dessen and Thomson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642.
Queen may refer to the trait of affected royalty found in many drag characters. It is also related to the Old English word “quean” or cwene, which originally simply meant “woman”, then was later used as a label both for promiscuous women and gay men (see Oxford English Dictionary definition number 3 for “queen”).
Terminology
Drag as a term referring to women’s clothing worn by men has less clear origins. According to one theory, it was used in reference to transvestites at least as early as the 18th century, owing to the tendency of their skirts to drag on the ground. Another possibility is that it derives from non-English languages. Bardah was a Persian word meaning “slave”, which developed into the Spanish term bardaje referring to a catamite. This was borrowed into French as bardache. The French word was then used in America in the American-English form berdache, and was used in referring to indigenous men who assumed the role of homemaker and dressed as a woman, while the wife left the home to assume warrior duties.
Female Impersonator
Another term for a drag queen, female impersonator, is still used— though it is sometimes regarded as inaccurate, because not all contemporary drag performers are attempting to pass as women. Female impersonation, has been and continues to be illegal in some places, which inspired the drag queen Jose Sarria to hand out labels to his friends reading, “I am a boy,” so he could not be accused of female impersonation. American drag queen RuPaul once said, “I do not impersonate females! How many women do you know who wear seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses?” He also said, “I don’t dress like a woman; I dress like a drag queen!”.
Celebrity drag couple “The Darling Bears” go so far as to sport full beards for their performances, which could also be referred to as genderfuck. Going in drag while retaining clearly masculine features is referred to as skag drag.
Some performers draw the distinction that a female impersonator seeks to emulate a specific female star or celebrity, while a drag queen only seeks to create a distinctive feminine persona of his or her own.
