It was a wild night on the town as a group of students from Feminist Theory 220 attended a drag king show at Club Chaos in Dupont Circle on November 1. Why would a group of women's studies students attend a drag king show (besides the usual debauchery that might be associated with a rowdy nightspot featuring cross-dressing and musical numbers)? Well, in Cynthia Deitch's Feminist Theory course, these students are reading Judith Butler. Judith Butler, a prominent gender theorist, has written repeatedly on the topic and theories of drag.

According to Butler, in her essay "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," gender is a social construct, one that is reinforced through a performative repetition. In this theory we are all performing a certain gender, a gender for which the copy is not discernable. Drag, in essence, brings this construction to light, as "the parodic replication and resignification of heterosexual constructs within non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called original, but it shows that heterosexuality only constitutes itself as the original through a convincing act of repetition. The more that 'act' is expropriated, the more the heterosexual claim to originality is exposed as illusory."