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I
t is not unusual for technological change or periodic shifts in taste to alter existing systems of classification, or for that matter the meanings of words in common speech. Drag and Mash are among terms that have been repositioned and opened up for usage beyond the sub-cultural groups—queers and geeks—with whom they were most usually associated.1 Drag, normally a noun, is derived from the Dutch word dragen, a verb meaning to wear or carry: a connotation that goes a long way to explain its traditional association, at least in English, with clothing. For much of the twentieth century Drag and the adoption by one gender of the garments of another were synonymous, finding expression in popular working class entertainments and a species of usually, but not always, queer performer. In the here and now dragging (verb) has emerged as a class of open-source imaging freeware based on one of several characterising attributes of the romantic artist, identified by T.S. Elliot as ‘the temporary extinction of personality’. It allows the drageur to overwrite established codes for representing ethnicity, gender and the orthodoxies of received history. Dragging facilitates the generation of a multiplicity of fictionalised selves—authored in part by media representations and proliferated by the diversity of personal taste in multicultural and multiracial societies.
Much current work that uses the body as a surface on which a sequence of fantastic or confabulated selves is projected, owes a debt to Leigh Bowery. His precursive practice located in the mixture of flesh, makeup and ephemeral prostheses was a site for display that convincingly combined elements of the proscenium arch, catwalk and canvas. Of equal importance was his pioneering of the nightclub... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline