Please if you can, explain how one impersonation of someone of the opposite sex is drag and how another is not. Tell me why Wesley Snipes in Wong Foo is drag and Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire isn't.
Neither Wesley Snipes nor Robin Williams engaged in drag - they both engaged in acting. They both played characters that cross-dressed. That said, Snipes' character was a drag queen - the role that Snipes played was of a male impersonating a female in an exaggerated fashion as entertainment for an audience. William's character was NOT a drag queen, the role was that of a male engaging in subterfuge in order to gain access to their children.
It really doesn't seem all that confusing to me. Perhaps because I don't actually think of clothing as a fixed barrier. I dunno.
There are cases where a male actor is performing a role where the
character is female, and the sex of the actor is intended to be hidden from the audience - for all intents, the audience perceives a female character. This is the case for the "2000 years ago" claims, where ALL roles on stage were played by males. The characters were intended to be females, and were essentially accepted as female characters by the audience. It's also the case for kabuki shows.
There are cases where a male actor is performing a role where the
character is a male pretending to be a female. This is the case for Mrs. Doubtfire and Tootsie. The sex of the actor being male is part of the gag, it's an inherent part of the story itself. The audience doesn't infer them to actually be females in any way. The audience infers them as a male
getting away with something they're not supposed to be doing, by pretending to be a female, and the audience is in on the subterfuge.
There are cases where a male performer makes a living putting on a completely invented and exaggerated female persona - and that is the core of the entire act itself. It's not playing a limited role within the context of an overriding story arc -
the persona is the role itself. Without the persona, there is no act at all. The persona itself is a caricature.
These are all cases where a male dresses in female-typical clothing while performing... but they're very different performances, with different implications. And the audience infers something different from them.
Consider a parallel: Lawrence Olivier playing Othello; Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, and Thomas Rice performing as Jim Crow.
Olivier playing a black character.
Downey was playing a white character pretending to be a black person.
Thomas Rice was performing a persona of a caricatured black person.
All three involve a white person darkening their skin for a role, but they have very different intents, and are perceived very differently by the audience.
FFS, I would really appreciate it if people would just stop making assumptions about what I think. You have convinced yourself of something that has zero relevance to my actual views. Just stop.
