Everything is drag

By Daniel Browning

Do you point or tuck? The collective noun for a group of drag queens might be a camp, as in a row of tents. In her blithe reading of camp as a behavioural code, Susan Sontag wrote that

"...the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even...”

This relic puts me in mind of a banner I saw in the overcrowded Spanish pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. It was a set piece in an installation by the artists Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller, who work collectively as Cabello/Carceller.

The banner exclaimed EL DRAG ES POLITICO.

Drag is not just political, it is so universal as to be mundane. The question is: how real is your drag? The now overused term realness contradicts the artifice and exaggeration of Sontag’s analysis of camp, in a performance of gender or identity so flawless and seamlessly authentic as to be real, to be subsumed by it in a becoming. We are all of us in drag, from the brickie to the banker, from the tradie to the tuckpointer.