Chappell Roan’s rise to fame has been explosive to say the least. Her iconic wigs, theatrical makeup looks and stylised costumes have earned her an ever growing cult following. Yet, questions about the nature of her performance in drag persist. Namely, ‘how can a cisgender woman call herself a drag queen?’ This question reveals deeper tensions around who gets to parody femininity, and how.
Traditionally, drag was understood to involve an exaggerated expression of gender involving cross dressing, where one would express themselves differently from their original gender association. However, such a definition is becoming increasingly outdated. It’s not as simple as being one gender and passing as another, Chappell Roan and other AFAB (assigned female at birth) queens complicate this story of what drag actually is.
Dr. Carole-Anne Tyler, associate professor at University of California, Riverside and author of Female Impersonation, offers a more nuanced depiction of this type of drag, coining the term “female-female impersonation”.
Dr Tyler began with the idea that impersonation creates a gap between who someone is and what they appear to be. “My beginning idea was simply that there was this disjunction between what one was and what one was pretending to be, but trying to understand what I meant by that.”
Drawing on feminist theorist Joan Riviere, Dr Tyler argues that if womanhood itself is already a performance, then drag is not limited to cis men dressing as women but something cis women do every day to “pass” as feminine. In this way, Chappell Roan is not simply being herself on stage, she’s performing a hyper-visible, stylized, and deliberately artificial womanhood.
The power of drag, traditionally, lies in its ability to critique gender through parody. “If you’re parodying something, you’re mocking it,” Dr Tyler notes, “and you’re typically mocking it by exaggerating some of its characteristics.” Think of the classic drag look: massive false eyelashes, overstuffed bras, cartoonish lips and hips. This is femininity dialed up to absurdity and through that excess, revealed as performance. Chappell Roan does something similar; her exaggerated aesthetic points at femininity, gesturing to its artifice and reveals the labor it takes to “pass” as a woman.
Dr Tyler puts it succinctly: “To be a woman is to pass as a woman, which involves a kind of drag.” In other words, femininity itself is something you perform that requires a transition from who you are to who you are trying to be.
By exaggerating and stylizing femininity, artists like Chappell Roan question it rather than indulge in its repressive tendencies.
As Dr Tyler says, “this mimicry or masquerade is like a wedge that enables some critical distance on femininity so that you’re not just invested in it, you’re actually critical of it.”
And this, Dr Tyler argues, is precisely what gives female-female impersonation its edge. To call yourself a drag queen, as a cis woman, is to insist that your femininity is constructed too and that you can play with it, parody it, and use it to critique the very norms that govern it.
Dr Tyler also notes that drag doesn’t only destabilize gender, it often critiques class. Her own experience as a working-class student at the elite Williams College shaped her understanding of this dynamic.
“We used to have these posh parties where people would dress in formal attire,” she recalls. “Of course, my mother made my formal attire. And I would do a kind of Mae West thing… I had over-the-top disco clothes, or this, you know, over-the-top formal attire.”
Chappell Roan’s working-class, small-town background is central to her drag. Her ‘Midwest Princess’ persona channels a kind of kitschy, regional femininity that doesn’t aspire to haute couture polish, leaning into a tradition of camp that uses irony and excess to critique elitism. Her drag parodies the classed ideals of what feminine beauty is supposed to be.
Yet for some, Chappell Roan’s drag remains questionable. Why? Because she’s a woman. There’s a lingering belief that drag must involve transformation, that it must take “work” to become something you’re not. As Tyler notes, “Back in the ’80s and ’90s, the way drag shows had a kind of loose structure… at the end of the performance, the person would drop their voice and pull out their falsies.”
So when a cis woman like Chappell Roan performs drag, some question whether it counts. “Is that just patriarchalism?” Tyler asks. “Or isn’t it that they think that it doesn’t take as much work for a woman to be a drag queen?”
But that assumes that womanhood is naturally easy and not also a performance requiring labor in itself. Chappell Roan, in all her rhinestoned, hyper-femme glory, reminds us otherwise. Her drag is deliberate, exaggerated, and entirely constructed – just like everyone else’s.
