That was never a deliberate choice on our part and of course there is some fluidity in it. Most of our performers are femme – or soft butch at a push. This is probably the category that most of the Pecs boys fall under. But with a femme pretender, the performer seeks instead to maintain the audience’s subconscious awareness of their performative conceit. One such drag king category that achieves this most is ‘Butch Realness’. The aim of drag kings, if we perceive them to be ‘male impersonators’, can often be to successfully emulate a cisgender man. One that stuck out was the ‘Femme Pretender’. In Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam undertakes a sociological study of drag kings in New York, outlining some categories that we found fascinating when we first began our journey into drag. I say this not only because it’s more inclusive of the femme identities that extend beyond cis womanhood, but also because it more adequately describes the elasticity of the gaze that we seek to create. I’m sure we would have said then that we wanted to create a ‘female gaze’, but now I’d probably say that our work goes further – creating a ‘femme gaze’. I suppose I wanted to create an audience in my own image, make them experience desire as a bisexual woman. When we first started out, we wanted our audiences to experience the possible elasticity of sexuality. We make shows that explore many different kinds of masculinity: an inclusive perspective that is typical of the female gaze.We make it for queer womxn: to acknowledge, appeal, arouse.

At the centre of our work is the exploration of the performativity of gender, which we use to undermine the patriarchy with our particular brand of searing satire and downright silliness. At its best,drag demonstrates that no gender ‘owns’ any behavioural traits, uncovering the absurdity of widely held binary perceptions.īut I do think it’s useful to examine my first impressions of drag queen performance – as an incredibly limited depiction of gender – in order to understand what came after, which was Pecs! Pecs is the all-singing, all-dancing drag king collective that I co-founded over four years ago. What’s more, it can be very dangerous when cis women suggest or imply that we own femininity. I’ve seen many queens since whose work is absolutely inspired. These observations are not aimed at all drag queens (#notalldragqueens) and they probably say less about drag queens in general and more about the limited experience I had at the time.

Not only because I was not the viewer that their provocations were appealing to, but also because, often, the femininity that they espoused did not represent a femininity that I recognized in myself. In the audience, I felt invisible, erased. ‘Isn’t it strange how you’re attracted to me?’ Watching drag queens in the past, I often felt that, despite being a queer art form, the performances I saw were still only appealing to a straight male gaze.These provocations felt so limited. In contrast to this, XCX’s video represents and embraces the sensuality, sexuality and fundamental humanity of the camera’s many subjects, in a way that is very rarely a afforded to women. It subtly challenges the reality presented by the male gaze, which limits the representation of women to the parts of them that are marketable. I think this is a pretty seminal example of the female gaze in popular culture. For a fleeting, joyous moment, Charli XCX has radically feminized the very concept of capitalism. The money (that most toxically masculine entity of all) unambiguously ejaculated from a cash cannon is PINK. Why am I being aroused by someone brushing their teeth? Eating some cereal? Combing their hair? And importantly, it combines its subjects’ masculinity with an overtly ‘feminine’ cuteness: tiny puppies, teddy bears, someone holding a baby… Even the more traditionally masculine props are feminized through colour. It is so playful and also, somehow, manages to make the most mundane things so hot. The way it is seriously sexy but also doesn’t take itself too seriously. The multiplicities of their different masculinities. The prolonged eye contact we get from the camera’s subjects.The diverse representation of boys. I love this video, as does every single person I know. But before I do that, we’re gonna get very busy thinking ’bout ‘Boys’. So, in a moment I’m going to talk to you about drag. Or, if you hadn’t when you first read that sentence, you took out your phone or your tablet or your laptop and have watched it since.

We can’t be having a contemporary discussion about the female gaze without it. OK, so you’ve obviously seen Charli XCX’s music video for ‘Boys’, right?

Drag kings