Look What the Cat DRAGged In

Drag has drastically evolved in the past 20 years, making it a much less mocked thing and rather something modeled and a definition of beauty.

In Monty Python's Life of Brian, one of the main jokes is a male using a tenor voice and dressing up as a girl. This kind of humor is then reversed in another scene when a bunch of females dress up as guys and use a deep voice.

“There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.”-Judith Butler

As the history of drag continues to evolve, the history of jokes about men dressing as women becomes less and less of a comedic trope that can be used in movies.

History of Drag

While RuPaul Andre Charles has popularized drag through the Netflix show "RuPaul's Drag Race", drag has been a long going battle between society's idea of toxic masculinity and men wanting to express themselves in more feminine ways. Drag started during Shakespeare plays, when men would dress up as women because only men were allowed to perform in theater. During this time, the term "drag" was created. In the 1930's, drag started to intertwine with gay culture in underground Prohibition scenes where gay men felt like they could express themselves. As society began to criminalize gay culture, drag was forced underground along with gay men serving alcohol at bars and speakeasies. In 1966, a New York mafia covertly gave gay men an outlet by purchasing the Stonewall in Manhattan's Greenwich Village which became a large hub for gay people and drag queens to meet. This place also became the epicenter for a lot of LGBTQ riots in 1969 against their oppressors. In the lead of these riots was a drag queen by the name of Flawless Sabrina. In 1975's Rocky Horror Picture Show, actor Tim Curry had drag flow into more mainstream media with his gender-bending aesthetics. In 1980's the music and film artists, Boy George and Pete Burns paved the way for RuPaul to change the modern history of drag in the 1990's.

Drag in Life of Brian

In Life of Brian, they use the trope of men dressing as females to create a sense of humor that doesn't land with the audience. Instead, this misleading trope reinforces the lack of women representation in films and the idea that men dressed in feminine clothes should be laughed at.

In one scene, the male who plays Brian's mother claims to have been sexually assaulted by a Roman but ended up liking it. With the controversial hardships in modern media about sexual assault, this "joke" does not land but instead reinforces toxic ideas about women being assaulted. Instead of creating a joke about sexual assault to reveal Brian's Roman heritage, Monty Python should have created a scene with Brian's Roman father recognizing him or revealing this big secret himself. That way they wouldn't be making jokes about sexually assaulting women.

Another questionable scene is when the Social Justice Warriors are first being formed and Loretta, or Stan at the beginning discusses their questioning of their own gender. While everyone around her accepts who she wants to be, the joke is about pointless activism with transgender being the subject. Those who accept her are being framed as idiots because of their statements about wanting to be Social Justice Warriors. The main takeaway the audience gets from this is "only idiots would accept someone's real identity and are worthy of ridicule".

Finally, Monty Python reverses the cliché in religious movies where women are being stoned by having a man be stoned by a bunch of women. Normally in movies, a woman is being ridiculed and stoned by a bunch of men in public for going against the word of the Bible. In Monty Python, they flip this cliché on it's head to have a bunch of women undercover as men, throwing stones at a man in public. While this may seem progressive, when Brian asks why all the women are sporting beards and can't attend the stoning unless their male, his mother simply replies with "it's written, that's why." Without questioning it, all the women just comply to what the societal patriarchy is telling them and has to change their appearance just to have the same rights as men.