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The Use of Drag in Broadway Musical Theater

Definitions:

Hairspray clip

Matilda- Ms. Trunchbull

  • Drag: For someone to intentionally dress up as a gender that they are not for the sake of performance.
  • Female drag: Someone that the audience is supposed to understand as a man dressing and acting as a woman for the sake of performance.
  • Male drag: Someone that the audience is supposed to understand as a woman dressing and acting as a man for the sake of performance.

Pictures and song

Peter Pan

*Note that non-binary genders are not represented.

  • For the Broadway adaption, Ms. Trunchbull is played by a man.
  • Ms. Trunchbull is cruel, child abusing, selfish, and a murderer.
  • She is supposed to be unattractive, with a large body and domineering presence.
  • Her presense on stage is almost always meant to make the audience anxious for the children in the scene. The only other purpose she serves is to make the accidence laugh when she does ballet, or other stereotypically feminine things.

What do you notice about how Edna is portrayed? Think about her mannerisms, voice, outit, ect.

  • Traditionally, Peter is played by a woman on Broadway.
  • This isone because the assumption is that a (cis) woman's body will be lighter and more aerodynamic, making flying easier.
  • It is also done so that Peter sounds more like a child than an adult. The (cis) women who played Peter all had relatively high voices.

Thesis

Peter Pan clip

Hairspray- Edna

  • Edna, the protagonist's mother, is played by a man in both the Broadway adaption and the most recent movie.
  • Edna is a large woman with low self esteem. She is in a romantic relationship and the audience is intended to view her as a sympathetic character, but her ultimate purpose is comic relief.

In Broadway musical theatre, female drag is used to villainize, humiliate, and create jokes out of female characters while male drag is used purely for practical reasons. This clearly shows that misogyny, and especially transmisogyny, is alive and thriving in the popular theatrical community.

In what ways is the male drag shown here different than the female drag in the other examples? In what way is it the same?

What does this all mean?

  • Women who display stereotypically masculine traits are not meant to be taken seriously by an audience. They are meant to be villains, jokes, or both.
  • This association with certain traits and masculinity, and that masculinity being put on women, hurts all women who do not perfectly fit the feminine mold and especially hurts trans women, who people most associate with these stereotypically masculine traits.
  • Male drag and female drag are completely different. Male drag is used for practical reasons while female drag is used to get a desired reaction from the audience.
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