Fashioning India’s Drag “Aunties”

As drag subculture emerges in India, it borrows many of its stylistic elements from Western drag conventions, and at the same time incorporates multiple aspects from Indian pop culture and dress to fashion its own identity.

In this paper, I focus specifically on how traditional clothing styles, like the sari, in tandem with the role of the disruptive Indian “aunty” have helped Indian drag artists to craft locally rooted drag performances. As the paper highlights, even though through parodying familiar fashions and familial structures and gender stereotypes made popular by Bollywood and Television soap operas the ultimate intention of Indian drag queens is to challenge and resist these frameworks, they also rely on, and in doing so also re-inscribe these structures and stereotypes to fashion their drag personas. However, as Butler (1990) reminds us that “the task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat,” and that through parodying gender performance as well as reminding viewers that appearance is an illusion, it is possible for Indian drag to destabilize gender essentialism. Furthermore, as this paper will illustrate, through incorporating traditional dress into their appearance drag artists tap into the long lineage of activism and political resistance vested in Indian clothing and textiles.