Fashion Media

‘Film capitalizes on our most primary means of communication, employing visual images that move us deeply… Each decade’s cultural anxiety and hope about gender is coded frame by frame in the celluloid representations of gender nonconformists’. Mackenzie (1999)

Stephan Elliott’s acclaimed film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and award winning costumes by Tim Chappel marked a major shift in Australian cinematic representations of transgender as well as traditional ideals of femininity and masculinity. The story centers around the adventures of 3 drag queens travelling through the outback and was the first Australian film to make the lives of gender-queer individuals its main focus, overtly addressed issues surrounding non-normative gender-identities and sexualities. Transgender theorist Gordene O. Mackenzie (1999) proposes, ‘images are part of a complex system of symbols that reference the world around us and within us… Much of our sex, gender and nationalistic identities are drawn from the bodies and discourses of our celluloid heroes and icons’.

It is interesting to draw on and compare representations of masculinity in both Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Priscilla (1994) as explored by Rose Lucas (1998).

In Crocodile Dundee, masculinity is portrayed as rugged and fearless which is indicative of societies expectations and ideals of the quintessential man.  ‘Solo Man’ is another example of this uber-masculine persona of the 80s. 

This portrayal of masculinity is adapted to some extent in Priscilla with the scene where Tick (or Mitzi) talks with his son. As opposed to the highly flamboyant drag dresses we see him dressed in for most of the film, Hugo Weaving is costumed much like this 80s symbol of masculinity, in traditional Australian outback attire of jeans, shirt and Akubra hat. The incorporation of a widely accepted ‘normative’ gender identity within the film makes the character more relatable and thus makes the film accessible to a wider audience. It is also indicative of the fact that whilst Tick chooses to dress and present himself as a drag queen throughout their journey, elements of his masculinity are still very much intact. This in turn raises the notion of gender as an act or performance and not essential to one’s sex as examined by Judith Butler (1990). She terms this fluidity as gender performativity ‘the fluidity of identity and the construction of that identity simply at the moment of performance’. An individual puts on a gender performance whereby he/she can reject gender roles, and in doing so, challenges the masculine/feminine binary. Alternatively or he/she can conform to gender roles, and thus, maintain gender identity normativites.

Sources
Tim Chappel, Guest Lecture at UTS  
Butler J, 1999, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.
Mackenzie G, 1999, 50 billion galaxies: Transgendering the millennium. In Reclaiming
Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de siècle, eds. Kate More and Stephen
Whittle, p193-218. London and New York: Cassell. 
Lucas R, 1998, Dragging it Out: Tales of masculinity in Australian Cinema, from Crocodile Dundee to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Journal of Australian Studies, 22:56, p138-146.