part0020

Two different visions of drag appear here: drag as reality and drag as a performance. Drag as reality means that everything we do is drag, that we all perform drag in our day-to-day lives. Whereas drag as performance seems to indicate that drag is an artistic expression.

Drag as performance seems closer to what we would see in bars and clubs, on stages and on TV. In “Born Naked,” it seems like RuPaul is saying that everybody does drag all the time, not just drag queens. But do those things go together? And don’t we want to say that drag queens on Drag Race do something more than just drag? If drag is done by everyone and at all times, then why would we watch a reality competition that crowns “America’s next drag superstar”? Is this a contradiction or is there something else at work?

We are all used to songs that touch upon the problems of existence. Many popular song lyrics are about heartbreak or about picking up the pieces of your life. Kelly Clarkson sings: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger;” Adele sings about the pain of the ending of a relationship. It seems that everywhere you turn songs are talking about what it means to live in the modern world. What makes RuPaul special amongst the plethora of songs tackling the problems of an existing individual? Surely RuPaul is just another accomplished singer taking from her own personal background to write songs—albeit one whose voice cracks at every live performance, as Alyssa reminded us in the RuPaul roast.

However, “Born Naked” stands out from the crowd of feelgood songs purely for its subject matter: drag. Drag was not and still is not a well-known and talked about subject in the music industry; so RuPaul stands out by the mere fact that she does not sell out who she is or what she does in order to make music that appeals to the masses (just don’t mention the Holi-Slay Spectacular !). Contemporary parallels can be drawn: LGBTQ+ musicians often cover up, avoid, or just don’t talk about their sexuality in their music. Sam Smith for example did not talk about homosexuality in his music until his album The Thrill of It All and especially the song “HIM.”

Other high-profile singers do the same thing: Elton John, David Bowie, Boy George, Miley Cyrus, and Kim Petras could all be named here. Saying this, other musicians such as Troye Sivan, SAKIMA and SOPHIE do acknowledge their sexuality or gender and express it through song not only in order to talk about the struggles of being LGBTQ+ in the modern world but to explore gay sex in an industry that portrays relations, be they sexual or amorous, in a mainly heterosexual and cisgender light. If this is the case, then should we not put RuPaul in this second category of LGBTQ+ artists who express themselves as LGBTQ+?

To say that RuPaul talks about the struggles or joys of LGBTQ+ life would be misleading though; rather than positioning herself as an LGBTQ+ artist, RuPaul has built up the image of a drag queen-singer. She does not talk directly about gender or sex in this specific song. Rather, her subject matter is drag and this is extremely rare even in the LGBTQ+ music industry.

Even amongst the Drag Race alumni, few have talked about what it means to do drag. Many alumni have gone into a career in music, appearing in drag in their clips; but not many actually tackle the question of drag itself. From Alaska’s “Anus” to Monique Heart’s “Brown Cow Stunning” and Bob the Drag Queen’s “Purse First,” most Drag Race related songs are based on a particular catchphrase that is put into music. “Born Naked” is no different in that it is a catchphrase that Ru uses throughout Season Seven. The title of the first episode is even “Born Naked” and the title of the twelfth episode is “And the Rest is Drag”! The song structures the whole of Season Seven: a remixed version even plays at the end of every episode after the eliminated queen has been told to sashay away.

In this regard we could say that “Born Naked” is no different to any other drag queen single with a catchy beat. To say such a thing would be overlooking one important factor: “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag,” the song’s main chorus line, is a statement about drag itself.

The originality of RuPaul’s song is that it does provide a definition of drag whereas so many other songs do not. This definition is philosophically viable but seems to contain problems when put up against the television reality competition that is Drag Race .

Drag is above all a play on gender. As Judith Butler puts it in her article “Gender is Burning,” drag can be an activity of playing with gender norms, that is playing with the binary structure of gender that society provides us with. The important thing for Butler is that drag is always linked to gender. As she puts it in her 1990 book Gender Trouble , drag shows that gender is a social construct. This construct is not necessary but contingent. The contingency of gender means that it is something that doesn’t exist as a natural thing. In other words, gender, or rather the binary nature of gender seen as male and female with a distinct separation between the two, is not something that we’re born knowing or that is in our DNA. This binary is something society teaches us and tries to maintain. And it is this constructed nature of gender that allows for us to “fuck with it” as Sasha Velour says in her verse from “Category Is …”

Butler is reserved toward fully choosing whether drag is critical of heterosexual norms or whether it reinforces them. While in Gender Trouble she seems to say that drag unveils the artificial nature of the gender binary, in Bodies That Matter she is more hesitant. Either drag parodies, or it reinforces heterosexual norms, but in every case, it is a play on gender. All Butler is saying here is that drag is not necessarily a way for us to attack all gender norms, to attack the specific binary norm that society is divided into a male-female distinction. Sometimes it can even reinforce that very binary. We can see why when we look at some of the attributes of traditional femme drag queens: a cinched waist, massively made-up, elegant clothes. Sometimes it seems like drag is presenting what women should be and not a parody.

When we look at the first few seasons of Drag Race (at least until Sharon competed in Season Four), we could easily think that drag queens are trying to be the perfect image of womanhood. This is a problem that crept up in 2015 when Mary Cheney, openly gay daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, accused drag queens of being misogynistic.

There are two ways people can see drag and this is what Butler echoes in her essay: either you can see drag as an art-form making fun of a false binary that society makes us think is natural; or, you can see it as making fun out of women. While I and drag queens like Miz Cracker (in an article on Slate.com ) defend drag against the accusation of misogyny, as philosophers, we still have to understand where the opposite view comes from and we cannot pretend that because we love drag, it is always in good taste.

Femme, fishy queens (like Courtney Act) and transgender queens (like Gia Gunn) can blur the lines between parody and manifestation of gender. Is a transgender queen parodying what women are seen as in society? This becomes an extremely difficult question especially when queens on the show often tell us how they realized their trans-identity through drag (Sonique in the Season Two reunion, for example). Sometimes it seems as if drag isn’t about playing on a false binary but about finding out who you are as a person. These two points are not mutually exclusive though, they can and do co-exist.

The judges in earlier seasons have also contributed to this blurring, calling out Adore for having a hog body, for example, or Michelle telling Violet that she saw boy in the “Born Naked” episode (Season Seven, Episode 1). When Michelle asks a queen to show woman not boy it may seem like she’s saying there is a certain way a woman should look. If this were the case, she would be reinforcing dangerous stereotypes that we see in the media all the time: a woman has to be thin, with perfect skin, and so forth. But Michelle has taken a step back in more recent seasons and doesn’t seem to criticize queens for this anymore, as long as the absence of breastplates or (more recently) contoured-on breasts goes with the general look. Aquaria was not read for her “Hat’s Incredible” look (Season Ten, Episode 6) and I would argue: rightly so!

Drag is also much more than just fishy queens looking like women. Drag Race is not just modeling and fashion (like in the Ball episodes) but also comedy (Snatch Game, acting challenges, and so on), singing (who can forget Alyssa and Coco’s amazing performances in “Can I Get an Amen”?) and many more.

While the lines may be blurred by certain forms of drag, the distinction between drag character and person is always maintained. Sonique as a transgender woman and Sonique as a drag queen are not exactly the same person.

What matters here is not the controversy but that drag is always a play on gender, whether the result appears to be a parody or an imitation. Whatever the case, a drag queen is always performing femininity. Even if they are transgender they are not just being themselves on the runway, they are dressed up in gowns they would not wear every day and made-up much more than in their everyday life.

Famous drag king Del Lagrace Volcano, as he is quoted by Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms in their 2010 book Sex, Drag, and Male Roles , says “When asked ‘what is a drag king?’ I reply: ‘anyone (regardless of gender) who consciously makes a performance out of masculinity’.” The point of drag is to make a performance out of gender, be that masculinity or femininity. It just so happens some queens and kings are cisgender men and women (bio-queens and kings) or transgender men and women. As long as they are giving a gender performance, they are doing drag.

Drag Race often speaks of this relationship between drag and gender. We will hear the terms femininity or hyper-femininity, most recently in Season Ten, when Kameron Michaels states that his drag is hyper-feminine (Episode 10). The terms of “realness,” “fish” and others drawn from the ballroom scene are often heard as well. The term “fish” is probably the best example of this and a turning point for Drag Race . Tatianna was both criticized and congratulated on her fishiness in Season Two. From that point on “fish” has not seemed to be criticized; it’s often taken as a badge of honor by certain queens. But to be fish is to resemble a “biological” woman and therefore to play a woman; this is not a parody but an imitation.

RuPaul herself even talks about hyper-femininity. In an article in The Guardian from 2018, she says: “We are wearing clothes that are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity.” So RuPaul is conscious of the play on gender that is drag. Here RuPaul and Judith Butler are very close: drag is about our culture’s vision of femininity or gender and drag plays with that in the bars and clubs. But whereas Butler theorizes this, Drag Race practices it and Ru does both. Drag Race exaggerates this play on gender by showing not one aspect of it but all of them: not only do we see femme queens lip-synching but also queens dressed as men (Milk as RuPaul or Ben as Paul Lynde in the All Stars 3 Snatch Game), queens with beards (Season Seven, Episode 3), and so forth.

First we have to ask: is the song even about drag? It doesn’t seem to take drag as a starting point. The song is painting a scene almost everyone has seen before: some person driving along with the roof of their convertible down, taking in the sun and trying to impress others. So where does drag come into this? It shouldn’t: there is no indication that the person in the song is a drag queen. But RuPaul does mention drag and there must be a reason for that.

A definition of drag is the main focus of the song and yet, it talks about driving down a sunny street trying to impress other people. To quote Miss Fame’s Donatella in Season Seven’s Snatch Game: “I must be confused.” But the conjunction of the two ideas is not as haphazard as it seems.

In a later line RuPaul says “It’s never been the clothes that make the man.” It’s here that the two ideas conjoin. RuPaul is playing on the idea that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover or that not all that glitters is gold; what you see is not always what you get. You may see a red sole on a shoe on a market in Morocco, it doesn’t mean it’s a genuine Louboutin! You’re not more of a man than anyone else just because you’re driving down a highway in a flashy car, roof down, shades on, muscles flexing, trying to pick up people.

We could then say that RuPaul’s aim is to tell people that men are not born but made: the clothes don’t make the man and neither does the penis! In that sense talking about drag queens would be saying that drag queens can have more balls than some muscle guy riding around town. Drag queens do things that other men would never dream of: getting up on stage in a dress, a wig and heels, risking looking ridiculous but in fact sissying that walk, voguing, slaying. It takes a great amount of courage to appear in public dressed as the opposite sex or at least an exaggeration of the opposite sex. It takes balls to put on heels and make-up every single day, enough courage for Ru to say, “Anybody who can step out of the house with a pair of high heels and some lipstick on their lips is my hero.” Whereas it takes no courage at all to be a creep, like in The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me.” But if this is what RuPaul’s song is talking about, then it seems that it does not give a definition of drag. It would merely be a song about the courage it takes to make fun of gender. And while you could read the song like that, it seems to me that there is more to it.

RuPaul’s chorus does not only say that clothes do not make a man but gives an idea about what drag is. But what makes a man a man? I think that this is where we should ask the question of drag. RuPaul is saying that everything this creep is doing is a form of unaware drag. You are not a man from the way you dress: some men prefer to dress in pastel colors, others in checkered shirts, others in white suits like Tom Wolfe, and some even dress up in sequined (or “sequinsed” if you are Roxxxy!) gowns and heels for a living. None of these choices change the fact that this man is a man—as long as he recognizes himself as such. Gender is about self-identification, and drag is about choices. But if my choices do not change who I am, what do they do?

For the song, they constitute a form of drag. It’s within this context that RuPaul gives us a definition of her art-form: “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” This may not seem like much, but taken seriously from a philosophical point of view, it becomes immensely relevant.

When contrasting the usual context of drag performances and the ideas contained within the lyrics, we come across an interesting distinction which RuPaul doesn’t seem to ever talk about. The song proclaims drag to be something universal—the idea of the line “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” is that not only drag queens do drag. The chorus says that we all do drag, constantly. But how is that possible? I’m not a man in a dress and a wig on a stage; I am a student behind a computer in a badly-lit room trying to understand what RuPaul is saying. Can I possibly say that I’m doing drag, just as you, my reader (if you are not a drag queen) can say that you are doing drag? The guy in the car does not call himself a drag performer but is told he is one.

If we understand drag in the sense that Drag Race presents us with, then it seems clear to us that none of us are doing drag: we don’t dress like the queens on the show, we don’t contour like them (at least not all the time), some of us may wear makeup but as Trixie Mattel summarizes in an episode of Drag Queens Read Mean Comments : “I have more makeup on at any given time than you will have in your whole life.” It seems like we have to understand what RuPaul is saying differently from how we think of drag in terms of drag queens.

At first, we may find this contradictory, but instead Ru is establishing two definitions of drag: one that’s general and applies to us all, and another that’s specific to the art-form of drag as a play on gender. There is a baseline definition of drag provided in “Born Naked” that can be applied to every social situation and a higher, more refined and restricted definition that applies to those few people who call themselves drag queens.

It’s here that philosophy takes over. While RuPaul proposes the definition “We are all born naked and the rest is drag,” it’s philosophy’s job to question what that sentence means and whether it makes any sense. A philosopher is a bit like that one annoying kid everybody knew when they were little that questions everything (or like Tyra Sanchez singing in the workroom in Season Two!). And while both Tyra and the annoying kid aim to test their audience’s patience, philosophers do what they do to find truth and reason (which to the unreasonable must be annoying). Socrates got on the nerves of the Athenians—and was even sentenced to death—when all he really wanted was to show how we do not know the things we think we do. Athenians like Meno thought they knew what virtue was; Socrates, by incessantly asking questions showed them that they in fact didn’t know at all.

What RuPaul means by “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag” seems to be something like this: whatever situation we are put into, we put on an act, we play a part, we dress in drag. RuPaul’s statement is similar to Shakespeare’s in As You Like It : “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players.” We may all think that what we’re doing is original or just being us, but actually, we’re all trying to impress someone else just like the guy in his muscle car. We can call this approach an “ontology” of drag: behind this barbaric name is a simple reality; it means that in this point of view drag is everything and everything constitutes some form of drag. When RuPaul says that we’re all born naked and the rest is drag, it seems to mean that not only whatever we do in our lives but everything anyone has ever done, becomes drag.

This is quite similar to ideas developed by the American philosopher and sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . For Goffman, we can understand how society works if we think of it as a theater: in every social situation we are actors playing a part. Not only actors in a Shakespeare play are acting, but we all are. Every time we step out of the door, we act through constructed characters; we’re putting on a front that we adapt to the different people and situations we encounter in our daily lives.

Goffman’s definition of performance is extremely wide and includes many things that happen in day-to-day life. Whenever we are in a situation that calls for us to influence how another person sees us, then we are performing, in Goffman’s sense. Snatch Game is exactly this but in an explicit way. Whereas in society we do not think that others are trying to control the way we see them, the point of Snatch Game is to influence others into thinking we are a celebrity. One excellent example of this was Alaska’s Mae West: she used the catchphrases Mae West was known for, took on the look and even talked like her. The whole portrayal was a triumph!

When we’re in society, we act just like the queens do in Snatch Game but there is not a television showing us the before and after: in real life we do not often see the worker before and after work. This may be the case with colleagues though: we all know that a very stern manager at work can turn out to be the most fun at the bar.

The social script dictates that certain people must do certain actions: a server has to wait tables, take orders, be polite. But a doctor must also wear a certain costume. They not only have to act the part but also look the part: if you saw a half-naked doctor in mini-shorts you would not immediately recognize them as a medical professional. This is not something the doctor decides for themselves but something society tells them a good doctor must look like: if they don’t wear a white coat or scrubs, we don’t recognize them as trustworthy medical professionals. In order to be something in society (a doctor, a teacher, a supermarket teller, a drag queen even!) we have to act a certain way and look a certain way, and with Goffman, we now know why.

We consider it a given that social situations provide specific roles with specific scripts or conditions. If you don’t follow a situation-specific script, it could lead to almost comedic consequences, such as when a person is talking when they are not at all authorized to do so (just think of a situation in which Michelle Visage keeps talking after Ru’s “Silence!”).

Many flops in Snatch Game herstory can also be explained this way: Alyssa as Katy Perry or Roxxxy Andrews as Alaska both flopped because they did not follow the script of the person they were impersonating. Not understanding the “This is my hair, I don’t wear wigs” reference or the “I kissed a girl and I liked it” one is unforgiveable in Snatch Game for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that the celebrity is merely impersonated by a bad actor and secondly the premise of Snatch Game itself (which is to make Ru laugh!) is not respected. The social reality we enter into when we step out in the world is one with a script, with different parts different people play or have to play. It is a worldwide Snatch Game where we have to act as certain people and where we have to keep up our character and not let it show that there might be someone else behind the mask.

Here comes into play a traditional philosophical distinction between reality and ideality: Goffman even devotes an entire chapter to “idealization.” Reality encompasses everything that exists; whereas ideality for Goffman means the normative expectation of what the perfect teacher, waiter, teller looks and acts like. Drag Race is in reality a competition, even though in ideality we wish all the queens would just get along. Ideally sisterhood means getting along with one another, but as anyone who has had siblings knows, this is not always the case. This is an example of where ideality and reality do not fully coincide. Remember the fight between Phi Phi and Sharon? That is exactly the point here. In ideality, Sharon and Phi Phi are sisters and should get along but they are always at loggerheads.

Goffman’s core thesis is that through our acting we deploy the different social roles with which we influence other people. He wants to show how in order to understand each other we have to do certain things and look certain ways: a pageant queen would rather die than be seen in a pussycat wig, in flats or without cinching her waist. Whereas Monét as a comedy queen can come out on the runway in a pussycat wig, Trinity always wears “big” hair. The only exception to this rule seems to be Silky Nutmeg Ganache from Season Eleven who, although having competed in numerous pageants, still appeared in both her “Meet the Queens” and the promotional spots with a muffin top as an ode to body positivity and embracing her big-girl image.

We have what Goffman calls an “ideal type” of what a pageant queen should look like: big hair, big jewelry, perfect makeup. We all instinctively know what a pageant queen looks like and that is why we can be shocked when we find out Silky has been in pageants and has over a hundred competition credits according to Entertainment Weekly . Another prime example of this is our image of big girls: we all think the skinny queens can do the splits and can death drop easily, but we’re stunned when we see Latrice doing the same thing. The reaction of pure joy when we see Latrice performing in ways we wouldn’t expect her capable of shows how our ideal type is a construct, how it is an image that is built up by society but that can be easily broken.

Goffman’s analysis bears strong relevance in explaining how society works, but is it actually contained in RuPaul’s song? When RuPaul says “It’s never been the clothes that make the man,” does she not refuse Goffman’s analysis, which says that there is indeed a specific way people must look in society? Goffman is not questioning whether the concept of “man” is right or not or is natural or not. He analyzes what he sees in society in terms of performance and that’s it. Goffman’s point of view is a descriptive or analytical one, whereas Ru’s is normative: it questions society’s established norms. In other words, Ru is one step further ahead: instead of describing how society works and how we have to make people believe that we’re adequate for our roles, Ru actually affirms that clothes don’t make the man. Being a “man” is to conform to an artificial, socially generated norm that just appears natural. And as with all other artificial norms, it can be taken down.

If everything is drag, then we’re all performing. This links up to the etymology of drag that Ru gives in the “ShakesQueer” episode (Season Seven, Episode 3): “dressed as a girl.” This etymology is something the queens mentioned in Season Two when Raven pre-emptively corrected this saying it is “dressed resembling a girl.” This is said to come from Shakespeare’s plays, where female characters had to be played by men or young boys because women were not allowed to be actors until the 1660s. While the etymology is folkloric and we do not actually know where the term “drag” comes from, one thing is sure: it is tied, not only in Ru’s mind but also in our culture, to the theater and therefore to performance. As in Goffman’s account of everyday interactions, the heart of the matter is performance: drag is a performance art, an art of performing gender more specifically.

Just as in Goffman’s vision of society, drag becomes a game of performance between reality and ideality. But whereas in Goffman clothes play a big part, RuPaul does not seem to take clothes into account. It takes balls to dress up as a woman and just because you do does not mean you are any less of a man. This doesn’t mean that Goffman and RuPaul are not similar, but that RuPaul chooses to focus on acts rather than clothes. The ideal type of a man and the ideal type of a drag queen only seem to conflict but actually are intimately linked. And that’s that on that.

Whereas we could think that performance is only for the stage, RuPaul reminds us that every single person is playing in their own theater production whenever they step out into the world. She even creates or uses the ideal type of the creepy seducer. Clothes never make the man because they are not enough to make the man or the woman. RuPaul’s and Goffman’s points of view are different because RuPaul is talking about drag, which is a performance of gender, whereas Goffman is talking about any job and social situation. Ru is not saying the same thing as Goffman but is expanding upon his ideas at a fundamental level. While Goffman talks about institutionalized and organized social roles, Ru tackles not only gender head-on, asking the question of whether a man is a man because of his penis, but society as a whole and the idea of who we are: “who do you think you are” is the recurring question throughout the song. Who we are is caught in the social script, not only in the jobs we perform but also something much more intimate, our gender identity.

We are all born naked and the rest is drag: we all try to appear like something in the world that is not necessarily us. We create an image of ourselves to influence others; we try to impress them just like the seducer-creep does or to convince them we are adequate for our role like the doctor or teacher does. Once we embrace this, once we consciously act the way Goffman or RuPaul say we do unconsciously at all times, we can start to think one of two ways: either we abide by the social script or we “pay them bitches no mind” as Ru instructs us in the song “Sissy That Walk.” The whole point of Goffman’s analysis is to study jobs and how we try to become like the ideal type of the job we have in order to convince others; so in that respect RuPaul and Goffman agree. If the bitches are paying my bills, then I do have to follow the social script!

RuPaul’s definition of drag in “Born Naked” seems to expand upon Goffman’s idea of performance, but in so doing tells us that everything is drag. However, if everything’s drag then isn’t what we call drag also nothing? Are the contestants who participate in Drag Race doing anything different from every other person in the world? We can say that, in an onto-logical sense, drag queens and everyone else do the same thing. (Ontology is the branch of philosophy that decides how to classify things which exist in reality.) That is, if we’re all born naked and the rest is drag then we all perform in society in order to impress others and influence the way they see us. If we understand drag in this way, then it seems to become a mere game of very advanced dress-up. But drag queens become like everyone else.

But we all know that this isn’t true. We can all distinguish between a drag queen and an everyday Joe. So, there must be a second way of interpreting the definition Ru gives us. If in an ontological sense drag queens and everyone else are the same, in an aesthetic sense, drag queens are completely different from everyone else. Drag queens are artistic performers, with conscious choices to express themselves. Gender itself is a subconscious, often unglamorous, exhausting performance. On stage, drag queens are not everyday people. And on Drag Race , we see the top queens honing their talents in acting, singing, lip-syncing, competing to become America’s next drag superstar. There’s no prize for the most mainstream gender representation.

If we understand drag in the way “Born Naked” does, then it seems as if we can’t accept the distinction between drag as it’s performed in bars and clubs across the world and drag as an ontology. The two things would be one and the same but that also means that the drag that happens in bars and clubs has nothing special about it. But this is actually a misunderstanding. For this to be the case there would have to be a contradiction between drag being performed in bars and clubs and drag as ontology. What actually happens is that Ru holds both definitions but at different levels. There isn’t a contradiction but a restriction. The “everything is drag” ontology does not oppose drag as a specific performance given in a specific place, in bars and clubs around the world. Drag Race is a drag queen competition not a drag competition. As such it means we’re shown professional drag queens competing against each other. But when the queens step out into the street after a performance, they enter the ontology of drag again. Just like everyone else they come back to a society where we have to put on a costume, we have to act a certain way.

Drag shows remain a special environment in which LGBTQ+ individuals can escape from the social situation that lies beyond the club doors. Eureka O’Hara talks about this in the DragCon panel in Episode 6 of Season Ten. When asked by an audience member why drag is so important in the current political climate, she replied, “People celebrate drag with us because it’s a way for them to escape and it’s a way for them to feel like they belong.” Eureka’s answer shows that drag is not thought of by drag queens themselves as an ontology: it is a way to escape from a world where we don’t feel as if we belong. But if we accept RuPaul’s definition, then can we think like Eureka? Don’t we have to maintain a distinction between the ontology of performance and drag as an art-form?

This doesn’t have to follow. We should rather think that there is a restriction in play. Drag as ontology is the low daily form that drag takes. It is an everyday experience that we all take part in. The television show or seeing drag at a local gay bar is the high-art form of drag. Both intertwine and we could even say that the high-art form of drag is a continuation of the low daily form. In everyday life we abide by a social script; in the club or on Drag Race that social script is questioned, is revoked, is fucked with.