Bradford news
Oh yay, the BBC has another story about drag. BBC News should rename itself BBC Drag News.
An Australian drag queen may not be the obvious choice to be one of the stars of a Christmas panto in Bradford.
But for Shane Jenek, who is currently playing Blue Faerie in the Alhambra’s Pinocchio, it makes perfect sense.
The 42-year-old burst into living rooms down under in 2003 when his alter ego Courtney Act successfully auditioned for Australian Idol (the day after Jenek was rejected) and landed a record deal. Courtney went on to be a runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race US in 2014 and won Celebrity Big Brother UK in 2018.
And so on, for 24 more enthralling paragraphs.
Your license fees, paying for daily mockery of women.
Well it would, wouldn’t it. The real trick is to get everyone else to believe “it makes perfect sense.” This is what the BBC’s part of all this is, though rather than using reasoned argument they’re taking the route of browbeating us into submission through shear exhaustion, via incessant repetition. Normalization through capitulation.
But why? It’s not the sort of thing an adult news org should be trying to normalize via incessant repetition. It’s trivial, for one thing, and it’s mockery of women for another.
Why? As not-Bruce says, it’s to browbeat you into mute acquiescence. The ridiculousness is part of the point; if you’re not going to object to that, you’re also unlikely to object to anything else.
The same applies to “race blind” casting on the BBC. The first series of Wolf Hall had an entirely white cast, as is appropriate to Tudor England. (There would have been a handful of black people in London then, but only 1-in-a-thousand.) By the second season the BBC had gone woke and cast dozens of black actors, including a Privy Council member and a sister to the Queen, which is just ludicrous.
They do this deliberately to dare you to object so they can then call you names and browbeat you into silence. And having a white actor as one sister and a black actor as the other sister ignores biology, but that again is part of the point.
Biology goes out the window in favour of socially constructed something-or-other; objective reality, and how things actually are or were, goes out the window in favour of how their ideology says things should be or should have been; merit goes out the window in favour of identity. White history is, of course, bad, since everything to do with whites is bad, and thus Tudor history is re-written to be multi-racial.
They are also trying to pretend that England always was very “diverse” in order to pretend that today’s huge rates of immigration are nothing out of the ordinary, again, so you see that as normal and don’t object.
Once they’ve got you mute and acquiescent over drag queens, the abolition of biology, the rejection of the sex binary, and the replacement of British culture and history with a multi-cultural society in which white people are a minority, then they can continue making further demands.
Leaving aside the race-blind casting, which I haven’t seen so don’t know anything about, in the case of the drag obsession, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make me mute and acquiescent at all.
What’s ridiculous about this whole story is that this drag queen is going to be in a PANTOMIME. There’s no particular reason to know this if you’re not British, but pantomime is a specific genre: campy all-ages stage plays of fairytales performed at Christmas, that traditionally have characters in drag. The Principal Boy (ie the handsome prince) is played by a young woman in tights, and the Dame (ie an old or ugly woman) is played by a middle-aged man in a dress and fake boobs. If you think it’s ageist and misogynistic then I’d have to agree, but the point is that nobody who buys tickets for a panto is going to find anything shocking or groundbreaking or interesting about a man wearing a dress and a silly wig onstage. There’s nothing to “normalise” because it’s been an inherent part of the genre for a hundred years.
What’s weird to me is that this particular man thinks he’s doing something original and special by putting on a dress and a silly wig to play a character that’s a beautiful fairy, not an ugly old Dame. But looking at the photos in that news story…I see what I see.
As I have never seen the show in question, I may be wrong, but I have to ask – were the characters portrayed by the black actors black? Or was it a role that any actor could perform? Simply because a black person plays a role (this is acting, remember) does not necessarily make the character black, unless you see everything through a racial lens.
Saying only a white actor can play a sister to the Queen is no different to saying only a lesbian can portray a lesbian, only a transsexual can portray a transsexual, etc.
We know that a number of black people arrived in Britain during the Roman invasion, and we know there were many hundreds of them in Tudor England, a bit more than a handful, wouldn’t you say?
Rev, in general I might agree with you. There are problems, however. When I saw a black Ophelia with a white Polonius and Laertes, I didn’t have any problem with that. The actors were good, and believable in the characters, and that’s all I cared about.
But when I saw a young black man wearing a swastika as a member of the Nazi party, it was more than a bit disturbing. (Cabaret, in case you are wondering.) There are some plays where the use of a person of color in a role typically filled by a white person can create problems for the production, because very few people at this point in history are able to see people of color as not being people of color but actors. That isn’t bigotry, it’s just reality. They might even support the casting; but they will see the person and feel those twinges when the dynamic is like the one above…and a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? that wanted to cast a black man in the role of Nick couldn’t get the support of the Dramatist’s Guild, who usually supports the producers on things like that. Why? Because to do so turned George into the opposite of what he is – it turned him into a bigot, when his complaint to Nick about making everyone look like him was written to be addressed to a blond haired, blue eyed, white actor. To cast George as a person of color works; to cast Nick that way doesn’t. Why? Because like it or not, the color of our skin comes with certain histories, and in the US, those histories are particularly vivid.