Being raised by a single mom and my grandmother, I did not grow up watching professional wrestling. We were more of a musical theater and old Shirley Temple films household. But, having married a man with whom I’m raising two wildly physical boys, I suddenly found that WWE was on all the time in our house, and I became transfixed.
I think my husband was hoping to get our boys to fall in love with it, so it was a surprise for both of us when I was the one who fell head over heels. After all, what does WWE have to offer a middle-aged woman who doesn’t even really like sports? I can remember squinting at the TV trying to understand what I was seeing, the over the top drama of it, the costuming and pageantry, why was it so familiar and compelling? Finally I realized: it was drag! Anyone who has seen a drag show knows that the point of drag is not naturalistic gender impersonation. To draw attention to the drag by performing in a show is to give up the game of passing in the first place.
In a similar sense, when people are having a real violent altercation, they seldom dress up in pink spandex and ramble for a few minutes on a microphone first. In both cases, exact verisimilitude is not the point: if WWE were attempting to mimic real violence, it would look like MMA but have rigged outcomes. In much the same way, drag queens like Trixie Mattel are embodying something beyond the feminine–exploring a region of the unreal that can only be called art.
As a fiction writer—someo.
