SOURCE: Rendell, Joanne. “Drag Acts: Performativity, Subversion, and the AIDS Poetry of Rafael Campo and Mark Doty.” Critical Survey 14, no. 2 (2002): 89-100.

In the following essay, the author notes “an abundance of references, images and illusions to drag” in the poetry of Doty and Campo, but she questions whether their poems are as subversive as some would think.

Gendered acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means … these acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organising gendered core, an illusion which is discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality … In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.¹

According...