My new book, The Desecration of Man, emerged from something I had noticed while researching questions of modern identity politics: The language of desecration pervades modernity and postmodernity. It’s there in Marx, most famously in The Communist Manifesto and his introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It permeates Nietzsche’s works. Dostoevsky disapproves but offers some of the most pungent analyses of it in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the language of desecration is now deeply embedded in much cultural theory. While disenchantment tends to grip the imaginations of those analyzing our modern malaise, there is a more intentional and indeed more religious motive behind many of our current cultural conflicts. Modern man deliberately desecrates the holy and takes delight in doing so.
Take the following passage from a research article in Curriculum Inquiry advocating for drag queen story hours in elementary schools:
As an art form, drag is all about bending and breaking the rules, and so its aims are totally different from a normative classroom. When a drag queen enters a (class)room, she generally intends to draw attention to herself—whether through shock, admiration, or envy of her embodied performance. There is a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred.
The authors’ use of the language of desecration is not incidental. It goes to the very heart of what they intend to convey. Drag queen story hour has a purpose: the mockery and transgression of the established values of wider society. As such, drag queens pose as radicals, doing something edgy and original in the quest to overthrow things considered sacred by previous generations.
There is another way of looking at drag, one that is not consistent with the smug radicalism of its proponents: It is just the latest example of a culturally dominant group mocking others by stereotyping them. Indeed, it is not unique in this. The trans movement performs along similar lines. To put it simply, they present male caricatures of what women should be. Take the most famous example of transgenderism, Bruce Jenner. Who can look at his cover shoot for Vanity Fair and not see that it conforms to the aesthetics of a male sexual fantasy of what a woman should be? Only men—indeed, only obtuse men—would be oblivious to such. The clothing, the pose, the pout—it is like a checklist from the Playboy playbook. And drag queens do something similar. They are men presenting grotesque caricatures of what it means to be a woman, their faces plastered with garish makeup, their outfits accentuating their false female secondary sex characteristics.
Given the queer love for theory, perhaps we need to turn the weapons of critical theory back on such people. From the perspective of power, drag queens are denizens of a patriarchal world that has sloughed off its traditional standards of masculinity but still claims for men the right to deem what is feminine by satirizing women’s bodies. In drag world, men still have the power to say what a woman is. And perhaps we need a new critical vocabulary to underscore this point. If it is cultural appropriation for an Englishman to wear a sombrero, perhaps it is gender appropriation, an act of sexual imperialism, for a man to present himself as a woman—or at least, as what he thinks a woman should be. Call it “dragface,” and juxtapose it in our moral register with its racial counterpart, blackface. The similarities should be obvious: The latter represents a cultural means of degrading somebody on the basis of his skin color by presenting exaggerated stereotypes of looks, speech, and behavior. That is deemed intolerable now in our society. But strange to tell, the mockery of women, whose distinction from men is grounded in far more solid biological realities, is celebrated as amusing entertainment, even in elementary schools. And dragface is like blackface in other significant ways: It is the preserve of men in positions of cultural power to make a mockery of women, whose only crime is having bodies with different sexual physiology.
Perhaps it is too soon to make such a case. Those with a vested interest in sowing confusion about the question “What is a woman?” have a lot at stake in continuing to promote gender chaos. And, despite a few setbacks in the last couple of years, they have plenty of money and cultural power behind them, not least the useful idiots in the media who find such things as drag queen story hour to be amusing distractions.
I do agree with these drag theorists on one point. They are engaging in acts of desecration but not (as they would no doubt say) of those heteronormative bourgeois values society has regarded as holy writ. No. They are desecrating what it means to be a woman and thus what it means to be human. As blackface presented itself as harmless entertainment and yet caricatured people of color and turned into dehumanized stereotypes those made in God’s image, so these cross-dressing buffoons do the same. And so we need to remember the names of those who today push for drag, with its hideous, male-dominated caricatures of femininity. The time will come when such advocacy will be regarded with the same disgust as racism. And just as there is no cultural statute of limitations on blackface, so there should be none for dragface.
