We observe a number of contrasts: unexpectedly, male models strategically ‘drag up’ at work. They parody heterosexuality or homosexuality to increase their market potential. They ‘do’ gender in strategic ways to enhance their employability to different clients. Hence men deploy non-normative gender and sexual identities that, while temporary and limited to the workplace, have the potential to upset heteronormative discourses. Such subversive performances suggest gender performativity can be both disruptive and reproductive of stable gendered orders. We conclude with a discussion of how gender performances are potentially unstable and dynamic, while also grounding and stabilizing, and always relational and context-specific. Theoretical Frame: Gender Performativity Alongside ethnomethodological work on ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman, 1987), Butler has been influential in the explosion of literature on gender and the body (see Gatens, 1996; Grosz, 1994; Grosz and Probyn, 1996). This work claims that gender has no ontological reality; it is an effect of codes endlessly and compulsively repeated within the hegemonic framework of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich, 1980). Thus, sexed bodies are not the natural units upon which gender is socially imposed; gender is “performative” and repeated renditions of gender performances serve to generate the appearance of ‘difference’ (Butler, 1994). The inherent instability of gender in Butler’s early work (1990) – she has subsequently re-examined this (1993, 1994, 2004) – points to potential disruptions and discontinuities of gender (Harding, 1998; Henderson, 1993) with the parodic qualities of drag being taken as one example of a radical challenge to gender norms (Bell et al., 1994). However, ultimately all gender is a form of drag and thus not all drag is transgressive. In a re-evaluation, Butler (1994: 32) is critical of the view that ‘if gender is performative … it must be radically free’, and critical of the view that ‘if we were all more dragged out gender life would necessarily become more expansive, less restrictive’ (Butler, 1994: 33, see also Butler, 2004). Drag needs to be situated or contextual>