2 December

These guys were playing with established male roles, each character a famous way of ‘being a man’, which they made fun of in gentle, funny ways. They didn’t think they were cowboys or bikers or policemen, they were reclaiming the right to define being a man any way they liked, by taking established ‘macho’ roles and parodying them. Trans culture goes in the opposite direction. It tries to overcome oppressive gender roles by multiplying them. Each role is then even more rigid than before, there’s just a lot more of them. Rather than dissolving the rigidity of gender roles it makes them define who people essentially are. We’re going backwards.