Content area
Full Text
Venus Boyz. Directed by Gabriel Bauer. New York: First Run Features, 2004. Videodisc.
This documentary, filmed in New York and London, focuses on drag kings and on women who, for a variety of reasons, explore aspects of masculinity through performance and in real life. The narrative features a number of the drag kings active in the New York scene during the mid- to late 1990s, including Diane Torr, Shelly Mars, Dred Gerestant, Mo Fischer, and Stormé Webber, as well as the German performer Bridge Markland and transgender photographer and performer (as both a king and a queen) Del LaGrace Volcano. It also includes interviews with the scholar and author of the book Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam. In a series of interlocking segments that include performance footage and interviews Bauer explores the many reasons women choose to enact masculinity. The reasons articulated by her protagonists vary from the feminist desire to expose the constructedness of gender-both male and female-to an exploration of masculine alter egos or an innate sense of masculinity. In some cases, women come to an understanding of a transsexual identity through performance, while others view their onstage personas as assumed characters distinct from their own identity.
The first performer introduced in the film is Bridge Markland, a German drag king. In an extended sequence that begins with her arrival in New York City for a performance, Markland ponders the pleasure she finds in blurring the lines between genders. For Markland, drag performance allows for the exploration of territory that she feels is off limits to her as a woman. For example, she enjoys performing characters who are "assholes," a quality she finds antithetical to her true self. In an effort to permanently stake out territory that is "in between" Markland has chosen to shave her head, which she sees as a refusal to be and an escape from being the focus of male sexual attention, and her name, Bridge (something in transition, going from one place to another), also indicates this state. In this section of the interview Markland seems almost wistful as she notes that while women prefer her shaved head, her own sexual pleasure is found with men.
Markland's act, which involves her onstage transformation from an excessively feminine woman to...