First I want to note that I am trying to tread lightly and trying gain some knowledge, not push buttons. okay So in your blog there is a picture of Sharon Needles in Blackface. I'm not condoning that behavior. I am curious, if a person in Drag puts on Blackface and its racist, isn't putting on makeup to look like a girl sexist? I get that its complicated with identity, power dynamics, and gender. However, If the criteria for racism is makeup couldn't the criteria for sexism also be makeup?

When a white person puts on make-up to make their skin darker so as to pass as a person of colour (or more often, play a caricature of one) they’re tapping into a long history of white people dehumanising people with darker skin specifically by dressing up like their completely racist white stereotyped version of them. They are putting on a costume without any understanding of the real culture and history of oppression (by white people) that comes along with having actual non-white skin/ethnicity. It’s a form of cultural appropriation (which is always racist) and is rooted in imperialism and colonialism. Sharon Needles dressing up as RuPaul would’ve been not a big deal if she hadn’t darkened her skin. The second she did that, she tapped into a very ugly part of whiteness. Even though she didn’t go all shoe polish with it, the effect was the same - dressing up as a Black person without ever having to deal with the realities and loss of privilege that comes along with actually being Black - and that is part of white supremacy.

The difference with drag is that when a man dresses as a woman he actually automatically loses (some) privilege because he’s transgressing the boundaries of socially accepted masculinity. There is NOT, as far as I’m aware, a long history of men dressing as women in order to mock and dehumanise them as there is with whites and minstrel shows, or in modern times white people dressing up in their stereotyped version of other cultures’ dress for things like Hallowe’en or themed “parties”.

For the most part, drag is about expressing gender that falls outside the accepted patriarchal norm and subverting that norm in order to show how ridiculous it is. It’s also about showing that our perceptions about what is “male” and “female” are ridiculous and arbitrary (a dress and make-up and suddenly you’re a woman?). A women is still a woman without her make-up on, or her dress on, but a Black person can’t take off their skin.

The two situations really have nothing in common at all. (Though that’s not to say that a lot of Drag queens aren’t really sexist and misogynistic, because they are, but that’s another issue entirely).