Reading Wong Foo: Drag Queens in the English Classroom

“Doc” (a pseudonym) is a male student in grade eleven who attended an urban high school in Alberta during the time I was investigating the ways that sex/gender influences, and is influenced by, the texts that we ask adolescents to read and interpret in our classrooms. Doc was enrolled in English 23, which in Alberta fulfills requirements for a high school diploma and is designed for those students who are not university-bound. I showed the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar to Doc and his classmates and asked them to respond to several scenes in writing. In one scene, Vida (Patrick Swayze), who is a drag queen and dressed as a woman, is rejected by her/his mother, apparently because Vida has chosen to deny the unambiguous and “natural” sex/gender identity into which s/he was born. When I asked students for their comments at this point in the movie, Doc wrote:

I feel sorry for the mother because her son is a Freak. His mom doesn't acceptate it. that doesn't mean she doesn't still love him. If he had the guts he would go see his family . And try and work things out.2

Doc's response to this scene—the emotions it evokes that cause him to label Vida “a Freak” (underlined for emphasis) and to mention the “guts” required to confront difficult family issues—is immediate, strongly worded, and apparently deeply felt. Unlike most of his classmates, who viewed the scene from Vida's perspective and felt a great deal of sympathy for her/him, Doc's sympathy lies with the mother, presumably because he shares at least some of her anxiety/confusion/revulsion toward a man who masquerades as a woman. Doc reads the scene in a way that ignores what others interpret as evidence that Vida did display “the guts” to visit her/his family and has made the difficult first move to “try and work things out.”

English teachers generally pride themselves on helping students to become more sophisticated in both processing and producing