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A Drag Primer: Situating RuPaul's Drag Race Within Academic Drag Studies

From Esther Newton’s ethnography of female impersonators to Judith Butler’s theorization of gender performativity, drag performance has consistently served as a source of scholarly inquiry and debate within academia. From various disciplines, scholars analyze drag as a way to address larger social and political questions faced by marginalized communities. The unprecedented commercial success of RuPaul’s Drag Race has seemingly reignited scholarly interest in drag. The growing field of “Drag Race Studies” heralds exciting possibilities for understanding the cultural production and consumption of drag in the 21st century. While this emerging discourse can push drag studies into new directions, scholars analyzing RuPaul’s Drag Race should also position their projects within the larger history of drag scholarship. This history (and the debates within) provide invaluable resources for scholars to consider the social, cultural, and political implications of how we study and theorize drag. With my presentation, I start to organize an “Introduction to Drag Studies” primer that will develop into an expanded article. My goal in creating this Primer is to connect Drag Race Studies to the larger history of academic drag studies in order to reflect on three key areas: What works we cite, What research methods we use, and How we account for our scholarly positionalities. For this presentation, I am going to focus on the first point—the politics of our Bibliographies. One of my goals is to provide Drag Race scholars with a bibliographic resource for Camp studies. My hope is to create a growing Camp scholarship Works Cited page that can be a useful resource for scholars interested not only in RuPaul’s Drag Race specifically but drag and Camp scholarship more generally. While I have tried to bring together all the available published scholarship on Camp, I am asking interested readers to add/revise this list by emailing me additional scholarly resources. Any submissions will be rightly acknowledged, giving due credit to those who send me resources. By discussing how drag scholars have discussed/approached these debates, I seek to provide a framework for contemporary drag scholars to evaluate how their research projects fit into this larger history. Situating RuPaul’s Drag Race Studies within this larger academic history allows scholars to expand the current field without repeating/perpetuating scholarly errors that undermine the study.

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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0245q9h9 This dissertation undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the competitive reality television show RuPaul's Drag Race, drawing upon approaches and perspectives from LGBT Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Performance Studies. Hosted by veteran drag performer RuPaul, Drag Race features drag queen entertainers vying for the title of " America's Next Drag Superstar. " Since premiering in 2009, the show has become a queer cultural phenomenon that successfully commodifies and markets Camp and drag performance to television audiences at heretofore unprecedented levels. Over its nine seasons, the show has provided more than 100 drag queen artists with a platform to showcase their talents, and the Drag Race franchise has expanded to include multiple television series and interactive live events. The RuPaul's Drag Race phenomenon provides researchers with invaluable opportunities not only to consider the function of drag in the 21 st Century, but also to explore the cultural and economic ramifications of this reality television franchise. While most scholars analyze RuPaul's Drag Race primarily through content analysis of the aired television episodes, this dissertation combines content analysis with ethnography in order to connect the television show to tangible practices among fans and effects within drag communities. Incorporating primarily content analysis methods, the first two chapters study the integral role that Camp plays on RuPaul's Drag Race, as a form of queer social memory and a set of economic strategies. Chapter One analyzes how Drag Race uses encoded Camp references to activate audiences' memories and confer queer cultural status onto the referenced materials. Chapter Two investigates how the show uses Camp to build a Drag Race-based economy,

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Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja’s act as the ‘Native,’ after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews’s elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations.

Studies in Costume & Performance, 2018

This article explores the spectacularized commodification of the queer body that takes place in RuPaul's Drag Race. In appropriating the political history of drag culture as both social commentary and activism, RuPaul's Drag Race silences the resistance to hegemonic gender binaries that is characteristic of the origins of radical drag. Drag Race commodifies the body through performances of drag that simultaneously attempt to subvert as they reify and fetishize hegemonic expressions of white, ruling-class femininity. This brings into stark relief the continuing relevance of both bell hooks and Judith Butler's early theoretical interventions into the world of drag. Our examination of RuPaul's Drag Race will draw on these insights by putting them into conversation with Catherine Rottenberg and Matt Sparke's work on the embodiment of neo-liberal market ideology in a way that speaks to Ali MacLaurin and Aoife Monks' conceptualization of the everyday through what Marcel Mauss refers to as techniques of the body. It is our contention that through the manipulation of physiology, the contestants in RuPaul's Drag Race render corporeality a form of costuming that simultaneously etiolates drag and commodifies the body. Instead of subverting gender norms, the show's capacity to create and disseminate legitimate and illegitimate modes of embodiment both reinforces and continues to shape already existing social hierarchies at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender.

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The popular American reality television programme RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–) has become well known for its racially diverse cast of contestants; notably, it has featured numerous contestants of Asian descent throughout its first seven seasons. Looking at four of these contestants (namely, Jujubee, Manila Luzon, Raja and Gia Gunn), I ask how Asian American drag queens use costume and other elements of bodily adornment in conjunction with performance in order to construct their drag characters. I explore the ways in which these former contestants embody their intersecting racial, gender and sexual identities through their costuming and performance, both while competing on Drag Race and in their post-Drag Race careers. Ultimately, I argue that Asian American drag queens often engage in an ambivalent rhetoric of race and gender both onstage and on-screen.

In recent years drag performance has moved from the fringes to emerge as a mainstream phenomenon, showcased on TV shows in the US and the UK. This collection offers a diverse range of critical engagements by drag performers, makers, scholars and writers reflecting on work from the UK, USA, Israel, Germany and Australia. Moving beyond discussions of gender theory, the essays consider contemporary drag performance practices, connecting them to the histories, communities and politics that produced them. Chapters range across discussions of drag kings in the US, UK and drag and activism; the influence of RuPaul on the generation of new forms of work in New York; transfeminist critiques of drag; 'bio'/faux queens; engagements with race and ethnicity through drag performance; drag andragogy; audience concerns; drag intersections with animal personas, and how drag performance relates to personal narratives of history and identity. Collectively the contributions focus on drag as a m...

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Reading RuPaul's Drag Race: Queer Memory, Camp Capitalism, and RuPaul's Drag Empire

• Schottmiller, Carl
• Advisor(s): Gere, David H

This dissertation undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the competitive reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, drawing upon approaches and perspectives from LGBT Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Performance Studies. Hosted by veteran drag performer RuPaul, Drag Race features drag queen entertainers vying for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” Since premiering in 2009, the show has become a queer cultural phenomenon that successfully commodifies and markets Camp and drag performance to television audiences at heretofore unprecedented levels. Over its nine seasons, the show has provided more than 100 drag queen artists with a platform to showcase their talents, and the Drag Race franchise has expanded to include multiple television series and interactive live events. The RuPaul’s Drag Race phenomenon provides researchers with invaluable opportunities not only to consider the function of drag in the 21st Century, but also to explore the cultural and economic ramifications of this reality television franchise.

While most scholars analyze RuPaul’s Drag Race primarily through content analysis of the aired television episodes, this dissertation combines content analysis with ethnography in order to connect the television show to tangible practices among fans and effects within drag communities. Incorporating primarily content analysis methods, the first two chapters study the integral role that Camp plays on RuPaul’s Drag Race, as a form of queer social memory and a set of economic strategies. Chapter One analyzes how Drag Race uses encoded Camp references to activate audiences’ memories and confer queer cultural status onto the referenced materials. Chapter Two investigates how the show uses Camp to build a Drag Race-based economy, through a process that I call Camp Capitalism. Incorporating primarily ethnographic methods, the latter two chapters study how RuPaul’s expanding Drag Race economy impacts fan consumers and drag artists. Chapter Three draws upon participant observation data from three years of RuPaul’s DragCon, in order to analyze how Camp Capitalism operates in RuPaul’s expanding economy. Chapter Four presents interviews with three Los Angeles-based drag queens, who identify tangible impacts that Drag Race has on their lives and communities. Through this interdisciplinary study, I demonstrate how Camp theory and ethnographic methods provide invaluable research tools for reading RuPaul’s Drag Race.

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