摘要：Drag raises the question of power and authority in gender performance today. Some see its performance as patronizing and insulting while others see it as a subversive and liberative act. This paper uses Judith Butler's work as the starting point for a discussion of drag's potential as a strategy to transgress the authority of gender norms. Drag brings a certain ambivalence to our discussion of gender and can highlight the need to accept in all feminist strategies the diversity and plurality of the gendered, classed, racial and sexualized female experience. Nonetheless, this coexists with an amplification of gender norms due to drag's full meaning in a world of gender hierarchies. Butler's work on drag brings into focus four themes relating to power and authority in the performance of gender: the disintegration of the subject 'women', the creation of new gender narratives, the denaturalization of the body and the breakdown of compulsory heterosexuality. Thus Butler's arguments make problematic the very categories we use to understand gender. In so doing, drag represents a site of gender confusion but not absolute transgression, as it is not possible to fully escape the dynamics of power and authority in relation to the performance of gender.
