Good Breaking The Concept Of Gender-Assigned Roles Essay Example

Performance artist Rupaul once said, “we are all born naked and the rest is drag.” Drag is an art where you put on a character, usually it is divided into the ‘Drag Queen’ (portraying a woman) or ‘Drag King’ (portraying a man) but like gender itself, it has many other characters in between. However, when Rupaul said his famous line, he meant more than the obvious. Drag is not only a character. It is an identity, an identity that a person chose.
Society more often than not assigns ‘roles’ to people especially when it comes to gender. Girls should wear dresses and heels and put on make-up. Men should be muscled and free of any face products. For years, men and women alike are boxed into these categories. It’s either black or white. There are no gray areas. People are expected to follow these roles or they suffer the consequences. If someone so much as questions these socially ingrained roles, they are criticized and ostracized. The article “The Last Time I Wore a Dress” by Daphne Scholinski is an example of what happens to people who do not follow what society deems as the proper behavior for a girl, especially in the earlier times.
“Three years in three mental hospitals for girlie lessons, from 1981 to 1984. A high school diploma from a psychiatric facility for adolescents, a document I never show anyone.” That quote says so many things. First, to be different is to be crazy. Scholinski was admitted into a mental hospital just because she didn’t dress or act like a girl. Her ‘diagnosis’ even had a name and a definition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Gender Identity Disorder. In fact, the only way she could get out of there was when she gave up resisting and put on make-up and walked a certain way. The second notion that we could get from that quote is that it is shameful to not be like anybody else. The fact that Scholinski never showed anyone her diploma from a psychiatric facility means that she was ashamed of her history there. In a way, we are forced into our very own ‘psychiatric facility’ whenever we do not act like we should depending on our sexuality. That psychiatric facility could be bullying. It could also easily be something more humiliating. The point is that it would be something we don’t ever want to remember. It is suppose to ‘teach’ us not to be different ever again. But Rupaul teaches us that to be different is necessary, otherwise we would all just be ‘naked’, stripped of who we truly are.
The contrast between ‘naked’ and ‘drag’ is deliberate in Rupaul’s statement. It tells us that ‘drag’ in a sense is like the clothing we wear. Just like with clothes where we also have our own style, if we change our ‘drag,’ it’s not us anymore. We need to understand this in order to understand what Scholinski meant when she said in her article, “see how far you can contradict your nature. Feel how your soul rebels.”
In the end, in is necessary to first understand Rupaul’s idea because to understand the concept of drag is to understand the concept of “The Last Time I Wore a Dress.” Both are a stand against gender stereotypes, an encouragement for people to start loving themselves. Ultimately, what Rupaul and Scholinski mean in their statements is that in actuality, we were born without all the gender-identity pressure that we have as we grow up. Therefore, the identity of a person should only depend on himself on no one else’s.