How (Not) To Talk About Dolly Parton

– AI-edited version of Dolly Parton drag performer, Jason CoZmo –

“It’s a good thing I was born a woman or I’d a been a drag queen” – Dolly Parton

There was nothing fake about Dolly Parton. Her play of proportions was all too real.

Rhonda Garelick, in her guest essay for the New York Times, “Dolly Parton Was So Fake She Was Real,” gets a lot wrong about Dolly. Nonetheless, in making a mess of the logic of Parton’s appeal, Garelick identifies some relevant details essential to our understanding of it.

Dolly’s “big uberblond hair, big lashes, big smile, big bosom, vertiginous heels and an hourglass figure poured into the tightest, sparkliest dresses” are, for Garelick, “exaggerated versions of the standard feminine proportions and embellishments that women are encouraged to strive for.”

Garelick is ambivalent about said “feminine proportions and embellishments” (meaning she both loves and hates them at the same time). Early in her life, she “struggled to strike a balance between glamming it up and wanting to be taken seriously,” provoking one of her friends to comment, “You look like a drag queen.”

“For years, I hated drag,” Garelick writes, “I thought the performers were mocking women for conforming to social conventions we did not choose . . . .”

Now, she claims to love drag. She loves it for the same reason she loves Dolly: “I can appreciate it as a commentary on the theatricality of female gender expression. Ms. Parton knew that power and freedom.” Dolly “showed us,” Garelick asserts, “how a woman could appropriate the costume of femininity for her own purposes.” According to Garelick, drag is a performance of “feminine naturalness.”

Garelick argues that what we saw, “the glitzy, outside,” was a lie hiding the truth of Dolly. The “real, inner Dolly” was hidden behind the “glitzy, outside, Dolly.” The big hair and boobs, that was all a trick to get her music noticed—just as her disavowal of feminism was merely a “business decision.”

Is feminism the art of portraying a sister’s no as a yes?

If Garelick is right, Dolly’s “fakeness,” her outer glitz, called attention to something else, to what we might imagine was the real Dolly, a figure amenable to normative feminism: a woman who never wanted to be big, but who adopted a big persona in order to be seen and heard in a man’s world.

Is that why people loved Dolly? Is that why people will be listening to her music and talking about her life for decades to come?

Garelick’s reading of Dolly is just too serious and uninspiring. In fact, her essay is downright symptomatic, the farthest thing from drag one can imagine.

No wonder Dolly didn’t claim to be a feminist. What a dreary business. For real.

Garelick’s take on Dolly’s appeal is not entirely off. Being is, as David Halperin argues in How To Be Gay, playing a role. Thus, Garelick is not wrong about Dolly’s “drag.” Yet, if being is playing a role, the truth of Dolly was not hidden beneath the surface of Dolly’s “fakeness.”

The truth of Dolly was always there, hovering over the depths, to be seen. Her truth was an organizing force; it had the power to create a subjectivity out of chaos.

I speculate that the people, especially gay men, who loved Dolly, like viscerally, loved her because of the way she played with proportions. Dolly was five feet tall and, as women like Barbara Walters pointed out, came from small people. Country. Poor. Uneducated.

Dolly’s big boobs, hair, and songs like, “I Will Always Love You,” what Dolly once referred to as a little song on her heart, were not disavowals of that smallness. Her big persona figured the pride she took in being all those “small” things, the things Walters loathed: Country. Poor. Full of “horse sense” (cf. “The Social Meaning[s] of Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot”).

It’s too bad that Garelick, in her search for something like Dolly’s feminist authenticity, follows in Walters’s footsteps. Although that does explain why her essay got published in the New York Times.

Dolly’s realness was—is—so real that women like Garelick can only mistake it for fakeness.