Among Judith Butler's many contributions to queer theory, few have captured public imagination quite like her analysis of drag performance. Yet this discussion, which occupies only a few pages of Gender Trouble, has been subject to considerable misunderstanding. Butler isn't simply celebrating drag as inherently subversive; she's using it to illustrate a more complex theory about how repetition itself contains the seeds of transformation.
Drag and the Exposure of Gender's Constructed Nature
The argument begins with Butler's theory of gender performativity: gender norms maintain their authority through repeated citation and performance. We become gendered subjects by repeatedly performing acts that align with social expectations for our assigned gender. This repetition creates the illusion that gender is natural, original, and grounded in some pre-social essence. But the very fact that gender requires constant repetition reveals its constructed nature. If gender were truly natural, it wouldn't need such vigilant policing and reinforcement.
Drag performance makes this instability visible. When a drag queens performs femininity, the performance reveals that the "original" femininity supposedly performed by cisgender women is itself a performance, not an expression of natural essence. There's no authentic femininity that the drag queen is copying; there are only copies. Or to put it more precisely, the supposed "original" is itself an imitation of an ideal that no one fully achieves.
But Butler is careful not to romanticize drag as automatically radical. Not all repetition is subversive repetition. Drag can simply replicate oppressive gender norms in a different register, or it can traffic in misogyny while claiming transgression. What makes a repetition subversive is whether it exposes the constructed nature of the norms being repeated and opens space for alternative performances.
Resignification as Political Strategy
This theory has implications far beyond drag culture. Butler is interested in how any repeated performance of norms contains potential for variation, failure, or resignification. Every time we cite a norm, we might cite it slightly differently. These variations can accumulate and shift the meanings and operations of the norms themselves. Change happens not by escaping norms entirely—an impossibility, since we're constituted through them—but by repeating them in ways that expose and potentially transform their meaning.
Consider how terms of abuse can be reclaimed and resignified. "Queer" was once primarily a slur, but through repeated use in different contexts, it became a proud political identity and theoretical framework. This resignification didn't happen through a single act but through countless repetitions that gradually shifted the term's meaning and affective force. The history of the term remains part of its meaning, but its significance has been transformed through subversive repetition.
Butler's theory of subversive repetition offers a model of political change that's neither revolutionary nor reformist in traditional senses. Change doesn't require overthrowing existing structures in a single rupture, nor does it settle for gradual improvement within existing frameworks. Instead, transformation happens through the accumulation of small variations, the patient work of performing norms differently, the risk of failing to properly cite what we're supposed to repeat.
This might seem like a modest politics, but Butler argues it's realistic about how social change actually occurs. Norms are powerful precisely because they're deeply embedded in our practices, institutions, and self-understandings. We can't simply decide to live outside them. But we can work within and against them, using the instability inherent in all repetition to open possibilities for different ways of living gendered and embodied life.
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