In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that media are not passive carriers of meaning but material processes that act upon bodies, shape subjects, and generate the conditions through which identities can emerge (Bollmer). Media, in this sense, does not simply represent; it performs. It intervenes in the world. It exerts force. It structures what bodies can do and how they appear.

The art of drag is a productive lens for understanding Bollmer’s notion of performative materiality. Rather than treating drag as an exceptional or marginal cultural form, I use it as a case that makes visible the broader media-ontological operations Bollmer attributes to all mediated identity. Drag helps us see, in concrete terms, how gender emerges from interactions among bodies, objects, technologies, and audiences. Drag exemplifies Bollmer’s core argument: Identity is the outcome of material practices, not an interior essence, and media such as prosthetics, language, and audiences participate in performing identity alongside us.

The Body as Medium

If media is performative, then the body is one of its primary sites of action. Bernadette Wegenstein describes the body as “our most fundamental medium,” a surface continuously shaped, rewritten, and extended through material practices (Wegenstein 2010). Drag performers make this process visible.

Egner & Maloney’s study documents performers who articulate gender not as a fixed inner truth but as something produced through embodied technique: padding, contouring, binding, layering, staging, and stylizing. These techniques are not superficial decorations; they are operations that actively reorganize the performer’s physical and social presence.

In Egner and Maloney’s study, performers consistently describe drag as something that operates beyond fixed categories of sex or gender. Performers move fluidly between masculine and feminine embodiments, sometimes within a single act, and anatomical exposure does not necessarily disrupt the gender being performed. What matters is not the visibility of the body’s “biological” markers, but the larger assemblage of gesture, costuming, movement, and audience orientation through which gender becomes legible.

Bollmer’s framework is useful here because these transformations are not simply symbolic gestures layered over an already-existing identity. They are material operations that actively reorganize how the body functions in space. Wigs, makeup, padding, and prosthetics act as media technologies that exert force on perception, movement, and social recognition. Drag performers, therefore, exemplify Bollmer’s argument that what we call “identity” is inseparable from “the material relations that allow subjects to be produced at all”. Gender is not expressed through media; it is generated through media.

Drag as Material Performance

Drag’s power lies not simply in its visual transformation, but in the convergence of materials, practices, and infrastructures that produce a performative body. As Egner and Maloney note, “acting in a way that disrupts expectations of how ‘normal’ people do gender allows drag performers to subvert gender expectations for both their everyday and on-stage gender presentation” (Egner and Maloney, 2016, p. 877). This disruption does not occur only at the level of meaning or representation. It happens through specific material actions such as costuming, makeup, bodily stylization, movement, and staging.

This is where Bollmer’s idea of performative materiality becomes especially useful. For Bollmer, media do not simply communicate identity after it already exists. Media are part of the process that brings identity into being. When drag performers alter their bodies through makeup, padding, wigs, and gestures, they are not expressing a pre-existing gender that lives inside them. They are using media technologies to actively produce gender as something that becomes visible and legible in the world.

From this perspective, the subversion that Egner and Maloney describe is not only cultural or symbolic. It is material. Disrupting how “normal” people do gender works because drag physically reorganizes bodies in space and changes how those bodies can be seen, interpreted, and responded to. What counts as masculine or feminine shifts because the material conditions that support those categories are being altered in real time. This is exactly what Bollmer means when he argues that identity emerges from material relations rather than from an inner essence. Drag does not represent gender. It participates in making gender possible in different ways.

Audience as Medium: Interaction as Material Process

One of the most significant contributions of Egner and Maloney’s study is the claim that audience interaction is not supplemental to drag performance but constitutive of it. Performers report that their gender presentations shift depending on the audience present, the reactions they observe, and the boundaries they attempt to breach. What is being performed is therefore not a fixed gender identity but a relational process that only takes shape through response.

This is where Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality becomes especially clear. For Bollmer, media are environments that shape what actions can occur and what forms of identity can emerge. The audience functions as part of this media environment. Their reactions operate as material forces that influence how gender is performed in real time. Laughter, discomfort, silence, and shock are not just interpretations of drag. They actively condition what kinds of gender expressions become possible in that space.

Egner and Maloney show that performers adjust their performances depending on the setting. When performing for mixed or university audiences, performers often wear more clothing and reduce sexual content because less is required to breach dominant gender norms (Egner and Maloney, 2016, pp. 897 to 898). In queer venues, performers intensify their gender transgressions in order to generate the same disruptive effect. This demonstrates that subversion is not located in any single costume, gesture, or body. It is produced through a dynamic interaction between performer and audience.

From Bollmer’s perspective, this means that gender is not performed by an individual subject alone; it emerges from a media system composed of bodies, space, sound, attention, and reaction. Identity forms through ongoing material feedback rather than through internal psychological intent. Drag makes this process visible by showing how gender must be constantly adjusted in response to the media environment in which it appears.

Fluidity as a Media Condition

Drag performers in Egner and Maloney’s study frequently describe gender as fluid, shifting, and multiple. Rather than explaining this fluidity as a psychological experience or an inner truth of the self, Bollmer’s performative materiality allows us to understand it as something produced by media conditions themselves. Gender becomes fluid because the material relations that generate it are fluid.

Bodies become sites of repeated inscription through costume, makeup, gesture, and movement. Audiences function as interpretive infrastructures that change what kinds of gender presentations become legible or disruptive. Performance spaces shape how far gender can be pushed and in what direction. The result is that gender is not simply flexible in a personal sense. It is procedural. It is continuously built and rebuilt through interaction between bodies, materials, and environments.

Egner and Maloney describe this process as “gender bending,” rather than “gender acting” (Egner and Maloney, 2016). This wording emphasizes process over representation. Gender shifts within performance as performers respond to audience reaction. In some cases, new understandings of identity emerge through drag itself. Identity is therefore not something that exists first and is later expressed through performance. It takes shape through the material act of performing.

This directly mirrors Bollmer’s claim that identity is always produced through performances composed of material relations (Bollmer, 2020). Drag makes this visible by placing gender into a system where it must respond to bodies, media technologies, spatial conditions, and social reaction all at once.

Gender as a Media Event

When viewed through Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality, drag becomes more than a genre of entertainment or a symbolic critique of gender norms. It becomes a system in which the material production of identity can be seen in real time. Gender does not appear in drag as an inner truth that is later expressed outward. It takes shape through concrete media operations such as makeup, costuming, bodily technique, spatial staging, and audience reaction. These elements do not decorate identity. They actively generate it.

Drag makes visible what Bollmer argues is always happening across media more broadly. Bodies become media surfaces through modification and stylization. Audiences become part of the media environment through their responses, which shape what kinds of gender expressions become legible, disruptive, or acceptable. Repeated performance turns gender into a process that must be continually recalibrated rather than a stable essence that simply endures. Identity, in this sense, is not located inside the performer and later communicated outward. It emerges through the material relations that connect performer, body, object, space, and audience.

Because drag requires constant adjustment to audience response, it makes clear that gender is not produced by individual intention alone. It is produced through feedback. The meaning and force of a performance change depending on who is watching, how they react, and what norms are already in place. This directly enacts Bollmer’s claim that media do not merely transmit meaning but operate as environments that shape what subjects can become. Gender in drag is therefore not just represented. It is materially organized through circulation, response, and repetition.

What drag ultimately reveals is that identity itself operates as a media process. The instability of gender in drag is not an exception to how identity normally works. It is an intensified version of the same material dynamics that structure identity in everyday mediated life. Drag shows with unusual clarity that subjects are not formed in isolation, but through ongoing interaction with media systems that exert force on bodies, perception, and social recognition. In this sense, drag does not only critique gender. It exposes the media conditions that make gender possible at all.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501337086. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Egner, Justine, and Patricia Maloney. ““It Has No Color , It Has No Gender , It’s Gender Bending”: Gender and Sexuality Fluidity and Subversiveness in Drag Performance.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 63, no. 7, 2016, pp. 875-903.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Header Image by Fernando Cysneiros (Taken at UBC!)