Browsing by Subject "camp"

Gender is usually seen as a binary system which is divided into men and women. It is defined socially and within a society, it can be seen especially in the ways we dress ourselves. We connect through clothes to the gender we feel as our own and the differences between genders are essentials in how we dress. Drag is a form of theater which was born in the gay community. It consists of forming an illusion of a gender other than one's own. Camp is essential to drag. It is a style which is formed of contradictions, exaggeration, theatricality and irony. Drag queens represent and make parody of stereotypical feminine behavior and the way women dress. The goal of the study is to investigate the way drag queens dress and how their dress is related to gender. How does femininity appear in the way drag queens dress? How do drag queens play with gender stereotypes and how it can be seen in the way they dress? The data of the study consisted of nine photographs of drag queens. I collected the photographs from the Instagram accounts of the drag queens. I analyzed the data with an aesthetic-semiotic model that was based on the aesthetic analysis model by Marilyn DeLong (1998). The model had three stages, which were 1) the observation of the pictures as wholes, 2) the separation of the wholes into visual parts and 3) the interpretation of the wholes. Drag queens based their appearance on typical feminine features which were often exaggerated. Their appearance was also contradictory and ironic. Drag queens used the stereotypical image of women in the way they dress but their characters were not based only on that. They use femininity as a tool for self-expression. Outfits that are assembled with care are based on creating an illusion in which drag queens use recognizable feminine elements.