Feminine and masculine personnas in performance

Abstract Sade Huron is a self-confessed Lesbian drag artist. In this article she discusses how her performance character, the highly glamorized Tutu L'Amour, came into existence. She considers the role of Cabaret within her work, its importance historically for gay performers as a vehicle for raising issues concerned with sexuality. Sade goes on to explain that her performance looks at the complexities that surround the notion of gender, in particular femininity, and how she paradoxically presents Tutu L'Amour as a ludicrous parody of her own sex and an affirmation of 'glamorous femininity.' She introduces Elvis as a butch dyke icon to challenge the idea of binary opposites within gender, i.e., the masculine and the feminine. Lastly she looks at how these issues are received by different audiences.