As a young woman, I struggled to strike a balance between glamming it up and wanting to be taken seriously. Once, many years ago, I dressed for a dance party in a gold lamé mini dress, fishnets and heels. It felt fun and festive, until a friend announced, “You look like a drag queen.” I was deflated. I knew they meant that I had gone too far, and fallen off the continuum of acceptable female appearance. Femininity may be a kind of “masquerade” as the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote, but it works only if you occult most of the effort involved. Looking “like a drag queen” meant I had failed at feigning feminine naturalness. I’d desexed myself with the accouterments of my sex. This is how precarious the whole beautification enterprise can be for women.

Drag beautification is another matter. Drag performers show all work. They celebrate it. Their goal is a deliberately artificial-looking persona. For years, I hated drag. I thought the performers were mocking women for conforming to social conventions we did not choose, taunting us with their liberty to play with, then set aside those same conventions. I felt like they were showing me up, beating me at my own game.

I’ve learned better. I now love drag. I can appreciate it as a commentary on the theatricality of female gender expression. And Ms. Parton knew that power and freedom. She showed us how a woman could appropriate the costume of femininity for her own purposes.

Ms. Parton seemed to gaze upon her stage persona from an amused distance. In a vexed 1977 interview, a disapproving Barbara Walters pressed her to justify her flamboyant style, saying: “You don’t have to look like this. You’re very beautiful,” adding, “You don’t have to wear the extreme clothes.” Ms. Parton, wearing a giant blue fabric flower in her giant blond wig, replied with disarming sincerity. She explained that her look was designed not to compensate for any lack of natural beauty, but simply to capture audience attention. “I’m very real where it counts, and that’s inside,” she said. “Show business is a moneymaking joke.” The distinction was clear — there was glitzy, outside Dolly and real, inner Dolly.

Eventually, the outer Dolly multiplied into thousands. That is, the Dolly Parton look was so beloved and so easy to copy that it became a popular drag persona. Ms. Parton, a great supporter of the L.G.B.T.Q.A. community, joked fondly about her imitators. In a 1978 Playboy interview, she wondered if she might lose if she entered one of the many “Dolly look-alike” contests. “Wouldn’t that be hysterical?” she said. “But I doubt if I would. I mean, I look too much like her.” That third-person “her” was the perfect reminder of Ms. Parton’s pragmatic understanding of her showbiz self. Years later, she claimed that she had in fact entered such a contest — and lost.