The Playfulness of Drag - Crossplay in The Philippines and its Role in Reclaiming the Artistry of Drag

Cosplay and roleplay share a great deal of foundations in performance, identity, and storytelling. Both activities provide insight into how people interact with fiction and reality, and how that interaction manifests in creativity. Cosplay, much like roleplaying, involves embodying a character/identity for a temporary moment, blending roleplay and costuming in an activity where participants may act out their character behaviours to realise their chosen character. The development of this paper highlights the history and evolution of crossplay in the Philippines, and how it parallels the changes in roleplaying practices.

The Philippines currently holds a strong culture of representing cosplayers in Southeast Asia, as well as a great deal of queer presence. The Philippines is fascinatingly paradoxical when concerning LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance. There is discrimination, stigma, and a lack of progress for Queer acceptance in the SOGIE Equality Bill. Yet it ranks 36th out of 175 countries in its acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. Central to this cultural acceptance is the importance of drag in pop culture, especially its solidified place in comedy and performance. This paper explores the complex Philippine culture of drag being branded as a cheap, inferior form of comedy, and how crossplay acts as a form of rebranding to re-frame drag performance as creative artistry.

The commodified representation of drag performances will be compared to crossplay -the act of cosplaying as a character of the opposing gender and often roleplaying the characters’ behaviour and mannerisms. The relatively new activity of crossplay is removed from the roots of comedic entertainment that drag is embedded with, giving it room for artistic expression free from the historic connotations of drag performance. This lecture examines the practice of how crossplay presents a new dynamic for representation in the Philippines; crossplay as a keystone in reshaping comedic gender parody in the Philippines.