Egner And Maloney Analysis

In their ethnographic study Egner and Maloney explore how ten drag performers of various gender identities from Pennsylvania use their performances, of doing a gender that they wouldn’t typically be seen as to subvert notions of gender held by the audience. Additionally, Egner and Maloney argue that the reactions of the audience members regulate the intensity of the actions of the drag performers. In one example from the article, a drag queen named Roxy had pulled an audience member on to the stage for a lap dance, this alone was meant to make the audience uncomfortable because most people would see it as a man dressed as a woman, preforming an act typically done by woman, which goes against the norms held by the majority of society. Although …show more content…
Westbrook and Schilt establish an argument that explains that doing gender can determine gender in everyday interactions but it isn’t enough in political spaces, in political spaces there is a supposed need for explicit criteria to determine what a person is. With this argument, Westbrook and Schilt agree that doing gender is a valuable concept but it cannot be used in politics and policy making because society as a whole does not accept that just the performance of a gender is enough to confirm that an individual is in fact that gender. This reflects society’s engrained belief in a male and female gender system; it is either this or that. The subjects of Egner and Maloney’s research realize that society has this mentality and they seek to use West and Zimmerman’s theory to dismantle these beliefs. The drag performers’ use doing gender in an unusual way, they portray one gender while being another gender. This performance of two or sometimes multiple genders, serves to break down the thinking that creates policies like the ones explored in Westbrook and Schilt’s work. The drag performers use their work to show audiences that gender is fluid and shouldn’t follow a “this or that” mentality. In order to show the audience this point of view, the performers use subversive techniques that force them to think about gender norms in society, they show that …show more content…
Westbrook and Schilt used the doing gender theory to show that although doing gender is enough to allow one to be classified as that gender in everyday actions, such is not the case in matters of modern politics. In today’s political matters gender is being determined through explicit criteria such as biological or chromosomal characteristics. The drag performers or Egner and Maloney’s study want to dismantle this one track way of thinking. They use drag to show the world that anyone can be born one gender but resonate with another gender or simply have tendencies that society aligns with another gender. They want to show that gender is flexible, and gender bending is possible. The political side of doing gender and the cultural side come into play when we discuss the North Carolina bathroom bill, as a society we welcome people to do the gender they identify with and we even recognize them as this gender until it becomes a matter of sharing intimate spaces with them, then it goes back to the thought that there needs to be explicit proof that one is of a certain gender. In other words, people’s ability to do gender is stifled by public law. They have the ability to do gender but only up to a certain point, when it gets to that point it becomes time to resort back to the birth