“The Rest is All Drag”: Trans-gressive Women in Higher Education History

Abstract

Studies of women in educational spaces have evolved to include considerations of class, race, and region. Queer women, however, occupy a limited space in the scholarship. Among the groups of women whose stories need to be included in the literature are women who were assigned male at birth. This chapter will intervene in the field of women’s education history by first calling into question the gender binary. The women discussed herein were not assigned female at birth, and their revolutionary and marginal identities were central to the queer rights struggles on higher education campuses in Florida in the 1970s and 1980s. Sources used will include oral histories, archival files, and student newspapers. Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the University of South Florida were the sites of gay organizing as early as 1970. There, gay and lesbian students worked to form off-campus and eventually campus-chartered organizations that promoted gay identities. The presence of trans women in these organizations complicated the activist process and pushed the gay men in the group out of their comfort zones. At all three universities, drag queens—some of whom identified as women all the time, some only while on stage, some not at all—made queer spaces available to all queer people. Drag was an important component of activism as queer activists deconstructed gender binaries on campus. Without drag queens, activists on all three Florida campuses would have been deprived of important education in identity and of places where queerness was not only tolerated, but celebrated, in hostile environments.