Women Performing Masculinity in Australia Terminology
A History That Doesn’t Move in a Straight Line
It can be useful to put the terminology into a rough timeline—but only if we remember that history is rarely that tidy.
Terms overlap.
Old terms don’t necessarily disappear when new ones arrive.
And a new word doesn’t necessarily mean that the practice itself is new.
| Period | Terms and categories | General context |
| 1800s–early 1900s | breeches role, breeches part, principal boy, boy character | Women performing male characters in theatre, opera, pantomime and melodrama. |
| Late 1800s–1910s | male impersonator, boy impersonator | Popular entertainment involving masculine characterisation, song, dance and comedy. |
| 1910s–1950s | male impersonator, boy impersonator, character artist | Male impersonation continued within variety and popular entertainment. |
| 1950s–1970s | male impersonator, cross-dresser, transvestite | Different theatrical, social and medical vocabularies existed alongside one another. |
| 1970s–1980s | drag, drag performer, cross-dresser, male impersonator | “Drag” increasingly operated as a broader performance and cultural term, while older terms continued. |
| 1990s | drag king, male impersonator, drag | Recognisable drag king cultures developed in Australia, including in Adelaide. |
| Late 1990s–2000s | drag king, king | Drag king scenes developed in cities including Adelaide and Sydney. |
| 2010s onward | drag king, king, masculine drag, queer drag, drag artist | The artform continued to develop alongside changing conversations around gender, identity and queer performance. |
This isn’t a ladder.
It’s more like a map.
The terms overlap, disappear, reappear and change meaning depending on where and when they’re being used.
That’s why it’s important not to force everyone in the past into today’s categories.
What Actually Changed?
If women had been performing masculinity for centuries, what made the modern drag king different?
Part of the answer is context.
Theatre has long ago allowed women to play men. Popular entertainment developed male impersonation. Queer and lesbian communities have their own histories of masculine presentation. But the modern drag king scene brings some of these things together in new ways.
That’s why drag kinging can’t really be reduced to women dressing as men.
Why the Words Matter
Historical terminology isn’t just academic housekeeping.
The words tell us something about how people understood what they were doing. If we call every woman who performed masculinity a drag king, we make the history look wonderfully simple—but we also risk erasing the worlds those performers actually lived and worked in.
On the other hand, calling a modern drag king a male impersonator can miss what makes modern drag king culture distinctive.
So it’s worth keeping the terms separate.
Breeches role describes a theatrical convention.
Male impersonator describes a historical entertainment category.
Cross-dressing describes a much broader practice.
Butch belongs to particular histories of gender and queer identity.
Drag is a broad field of stylised gender performance.
Drag king describes a modern performance category centred on the construction and performance of masculinity.
The boundaries aren’t always perfectly neat.
And that’s okay.
History rarely is.
The modern drag king artform inherited plenty from what came before but inheritance isn’t identity.
A modern drag king isn’t just a male impersonator with a new name.
And a woman who performed masculinity a hundred years ago wasn’t necessarily a drag king waiting for history to catch up.
The history is more complicated—and much more interesting—than that.
The artform has a long ancestry, but its modern identity grew out of particular cultural moments, communities and performance scenes.
References
Aston, Elaine. 1988. “Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: The Case of Vesta Tilley.” New Theatre Quarterly 4 (15): 247–257.
Barnard, Pamela Cobrin. 2012. “She’s Old Enough to Be a Beautiful Young Boy: Sarah Bernhardt, Breeches Roles and the Poetics of Aging.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22 (1): 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2012.685836.
Prieto Pablos, Juan Antonio. 2012. “Women in Breeches and Modes of Masculinity in Restoration Comedy.” SEDERI Yearbook 22: 69–91. State History Collection, South Australia.
