Is she he? Drag discourse and drag logic in online media reports of gender variance

Abstract

This article investigates online entertainment news, magazine, and gossip reports that use canonical terms and ideas attached to theatrical gender-bending—“drag discourses”—to identify gender variant bodies and expressions. Drag discourse pervades the coverage of female-identified menswear models Elliott Sailors and Casey Legler, and female-identified pop stars Lady Gaga and Beyoncé Knowles. I first investigate why media texts use drag as descriptor, especially when it rarely aligns with public figures’ own expressions of identity or intentionality. I then investigate what I term “drag logic,” or how publics engage with drag discourse to inform or support their interpretations of embodied “realness.” I argue that drag logic is an open-ended analytic: a method of meaning making that is unpredictable and subject to individual processes. While drag logic has led to some reductive conclusions about gender variant people, I suggest the pervasive online rumor that Gaga is male-bodied demonstrates the creative potential of this analytic. Drawing on the concept of radical queerness, I conclude by proposing that drag logic is a semiotic with the potential to dismantle the ideological stability of the “real” body.