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ral of them live together. They compete in the drag balls under the tutelage of a house, representing their drag family while leaving all real familial connections to the outside world at the door. The spectacle of the drag balls goes so far as to create a different world, one completely apart from the dominant culture. This world is the only place that these men can go and be themselves without fear of discrimination; a discrimination that leads relentless physical and emotional harm.

 

However, in this world these men mimic dominant culture, thus reinforcing its norms. Some of these men desired to completely lose their identity as men and become integrated into the dominant culture as women. For Venus Xtravaganza, one of the members of the 'House of Xtravaganza,' her greatest dream was to be truly assimilated. She desired to be a white suburb wife with a husband and a washing machine, away from the drag culture where people knew her 'little secret.' On a more subtle level, dressing in drag 'is nothing but the displacement and appropriation of 'women,' and hence fundamentally based in misogyny, a hatred of women' where 'women are the object of hatred and appropriation, and that there is nothing in the identification that is respectful or elevating' (Butler, 'Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,' 127 and 125). These men take on the identity of women, parading around as them and, as one drag queen put it, 'being more woman than women.' If drag queens can out-woman women, and drag queens are near the bottom of the social hierarchy, they displace women to an even lower rank, supporting the patriarchy.

 

Dressing in drag and mimicking the dominant heterosexual white patriarchy does not just further marginalize women, but other discriminated minorities as well. These men did not just mimic womanhood, but instead mimicked a very specific white womanhood. By idealizing white womanhood, African American and Latino men devalue their own cultures and the beauty of their own women. They present the idea that the 'brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself – its way of life – [is] the only meaningful life there is' (hooks, 'Is Paris Burning?' 149). Paris is Burning is 'portrait of the way in which colonized black people... worship at the throne of whiteness' (hooks, 149). To achieve an idealized, happy, prosperous life these minority men imitate the life that they see that achieves this, the white life. In doing so, they disregard their own culture; devaluing it in the process.

 

Dressing in drag does not solely reinforce set white patriarchal norms. It can also act as one of the 'subversive places where gender norms were questioned and challenged' (hooks, 145). By dressing in drag, these men are challenging the binary division of gender. No longer is there just 'male' and 'female,' but also 'male that dresses as female,' 'male who thinks he is female,' and so on. Pepper Labeija, the mother of the house of Labeija, makes it very clear that he is proud to be his individualistic self: a man who dresses in drag, is homosexual, but desires to remain male. Each member本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。