The idea of beauty as performance — and as successful gender performance — is not what’s new. “Women are all female impersonators to some degree,” Susan Brownmiller wrote in the ’80s; “flawless” has been part of drag argot for years. (It even provided the title of an appalling 1999 comedy in which Philip Seymour Hoffman starred as a drag queen giving singing lessons to Robert De Niro’s brooding bigot cop.) Joe E. Jeffreys, a historian of drag culture who teaches at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts, told me he can trace the word back to at least the 1960s. “It’s an underground word,” he said. “People sometimes say that they ‘spooked your beard,’ meaning they can see through your makeup foundation to your facial hair and see that you’re a guy. To be ‘flawless’ is to be the opposite of that. There’s nothing to see through, it’s so perfect.”

This usage, he says, can probably be linked to one individual: Flawless Sabrina, a legendary godmother of American drag. William S. Burroughs was her lover; Andy Warhol, a supporter. Diane Arbus photographed her in Central Park looking gaunt and glorious, with her narrow body and bright bulb of hair. In the years when cross-dressing could get you arrested (and long before “Paris Is Burning”), she established a national circuit of beauty pageants for drag queens, traveling across America in the ’50s and ’60s. Jeffreys suspects that the term “flawless” followed her. Flawless Sabrina, now in her 70s, cautiously agrees. It was “tongue in cheek,” she says of her name. She was attracted “to the irony of it,” she adds. “This idea of a paragon of perfection. God knows I was anything but perfect.”

In its current life online, however, the word has shed some of this irony; it is now deployed with earnest self-satisfaction. The video for “***Flawless” contains a clip from the televised talent show “Star Search,” with a 12-year-old Beyoncé and her girl group keeping their smiles in place as they learn that they have lost the contest. An adult Beyoncé, looking at once tomboyish, severe and sexy, delivers a scattershot message of feminism, gratitude to her family, strong words for detractors. Her sardonic refrain, “I woke up like this,” winks at the major production involved in making her camera-ready. The song’s lyrics double as a recitation of assets: “My diamond flawless,” she sings, “My Roc flawless,” referring both to her jewels and to her husband Jay-Z’s entertainment company, Roc Nation. Her version of flawlessness means to be well fortified — by family, by marriage, by money. It is rigorously controlled, hypercompetent, hypercapitalist — never dangerous or disheveled.