Before reading The Psychic Life of Power, I had often thought of the performance of drag as a sort of simulacrum. Like Butler describes on p. 145, drag queens imitate an idealized femininity that itself is a simulation. Right, I couldn't classify a 200-pound drag queen as a hyper-real woman, "realer than real"--but perhaps feminine-er than feminine. My reading of drag as simulacrum stemmed from a viewing a few years ago of the documentary Paris Is Burning. There were aspects of the black male homosexual and transsexual ball life of 80's Harlem that, when I saw PIB, lent themselves to a Baudrillard reading. The ball competitors, for example, were judged on criteria of "Realness"--or as one ball member explained, the ability to blend in. This was reflected in the ball categories: Schoolgirl/Schoolboy Realness, Executive Realness, Military Realness, Femme Queen Realness, etc. For the Town and Country category, ball-goers channeled images of wealthy WASP lifestyles advertised in T&C magazine and depicted in Dynasty. These images of wealth and femininity are themselves simulacra, copies without an original--the characters on The Coltons are merely simulating "real wealth." To the contestants, reality was the opulent world normalized in the media--their impoverished, black, homosexual world wasn't "Real."
After reading the Butler, I'm wondering if there's a psychoanalytical approach that could supplement a simulacra reading of PIB--that is, Butler's emphasis on melancholy. There does seem to be "a dissatisfied longing in the mimetic incorporation of gender that is drag" that, for PIB, perhaps could be extended to imitation of class and status. The members of this Harlem ball culture attempt to perform the joys of the utopian America depicted in the media--namely, that which they don't have: wealth, whiteness, straightness, "Realness." They imitate that which is radically uninhabitable--performing an "ungrieved loss" within gender, grief for a withdrawn object. I'm wary, however, of applying this performative allegorization of melancholy to class and race (as in the imitation of wealth and whiteness in PIB). Additionally, many of the ball-goers in PIB were transsexual, not men in drag; how does this change the performance of gender and melancholy (or, wait, grief--I'm confusing the two)? Does Butler offer a reading of transsexuality elsewhere?