Since the beginning of the 2010s, and the success of the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queens have been in the spotlight. But what is drag art, what skills does this art rely on? On what cultural practices has this art been built in France and the United States?
This is the subject of your research Margot Reyraud, you are a doctor in theater studies at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne and you have just published a book The Drag, exploration of a spectacular practice (Ed. Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal) from your thesis.
Carried by increasing media exposure, drag imposes itself as a full-fledged art form, based on “the art of self-transformation” and on a multiple performance that “plays on gender codes” and includes “singing, dancing, lip-sync, stand-up, etc.” This diversity makes it a total art, where “artists master the art of transforming bodies, but also live performance.” While drag queens dominate the popular imagination, other forms coexist such as “drag kings or queer figures” offering “more ambiguous representations” that blur binary categories and broaden scenic possibilities.
Far from being a recent trend, drag is part of a plural history. It draws in particular from the American ballroom scene, an artistic competition space within Afro-Latino-queer communities, but also from the French tradition where “it is more linked to the history of cabaret”, which already offered a stage for marginalized artists. Today, these legacies are recomposed in contemporary forms where “the drag scene also organizes in competition”, while maintaining the spirit of live performance. The recent popularization has not created the phenomenon, it has simply increased its diffusion.
What is striking is the speed with which a long marginalized practice has established itself at the heart of popular culture. “It comes from the avant-garde and is now incredibly popular,” explains Margot Reynaud, highlighting a diffusion accelerated by the media. In a few years, drag has emerged from confidential circles to invest a wide variety of venues and become “a media phenomenon but also a phenomenon in the art of performance”, deeply transforming artistic visibility circuits.
Beyond its success, drag acts as a driver of aesthetic renewal. By questioning the construction of characters and offering “very spectacular figures”, it opens up new scenic imaginaries. Its “multiform, constantly evolving” nature makes it a privileged field of experimentation for live performance. Observed since the 2010s, its expansion shows no signs of slowing down: “I have seen the explosion of the movement (…) and I think it will continue”, a sign that beyond the trend, drag is establishing itself permanently as a force for transformation in contemporary theater.
