Browsing by Subject "queer culture"

This thesis focuses on the reality tv show RuPaul’s Drag Race and its legacy building. The show is a popular competition show for professional drag queens. In this study I show how RuPaul’s Drag Race engages in building a legacy of drag and posits itself as the ambassador of drag for mainstream audiences. The elements of this legacy building I analyze in this study are the show’s version of history of drag in the USA and who fits in it; references to and appropriation of minority subcultures; employment and perpetuating of racializing stereotypes; and use of different types of family discourse. I focused on 2014’s RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6 as a case study. I conducted several rounds of close reading and watching of the season’s 14 episodes, with corresponding episodes of the behind-the-scenes series Untucked, and transcribed relevant dialogue. For a more in-depth analysis of the show’s referential nature of history writing, I included in my analysis the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning that is frequently referenced in RuPaul’s Drag Race. To support my analysis of the role of family discourse in RuPaul’s Drag Race’s legacy building, I also analyzed selected promotional material for the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise that employs these discourses. Based on close reading and watching of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6, Paris Is Burning, and the selected promotional material for RuPaul’s Drag Race related products, and reflecting upon previous studies on drag in general and RuPaul’s Drag Race in particular, I identified and analyzed prominent themes in the episodes, recurring elements in the show, individual contest assignments, and the show’s panel of judges’ critiques of the contestants’ performances. I performed an in-depth analysis of the show’s cast and the references that RuPaul’s Drag Race makes to other cultural products and subcultures, from the point of view of narratives and discourses that I interpret as legacy building. Throughout this analysis, I kept language as one key focus. My analysis of the language used in RuPaul’s Drag Race is mainly informed by sociolinguistic studies on drag queens’ use of language conducted by Barrett (1998), Mann (2011) and Simmons (2014). I analyze the narratives that arise in RuPaul’s Drag Race concerning history writing and different traditions of drag, discussing with Shetina’s 2018 study on queer citation and Schottmiller’s 2017 study on camp referencing as queer memory in RuPaul’s Drag Race. My analysis of the portrayal of racializing stereotypes and appropriation of minority subcultures in RuPaul’s Drag Race discusses with hooks (1992), Strings and Bui (2014), and Rodriquez (2006). In my analysis of the different family discourses utilized by RuPaul’s Drag Race, I refer to Arnold and Bailey’s study on “houses” in ballroom culture (2009), and make use of the notion of queer chosen family (Hicks 2011). I show in this study how, through referencing other cultural products like Paris Is Burning, RuPaul’s Drag Race writes a version of the history of drag in the USA and appears as a keeper of this drag legacy and an educator of the audience on the history of drag; how this legacy includes gay men and largely excludes trans women; how different traditions of drag are portrayed through categorizations that introduce recognizable styles of drag to an outsider audience; how the show employs racializing stereotypes tailored to an outsider perspective of a presumed white audience and appropriates Black subcultures; and how Black street esthetics are used in the show for “authenticity” and “spice”, so that providing white middle-class audiences with fresh material from marginalized cultures becomes part of the show’s legacy. I also suggest that RuPaul’s Drag Race encompasses the audience and the cast of the show in an apparatus of an imagined family as spectacle in a legacy that is fortified by promoting the ‘code of sisterhood’ (Simmons 2014) that delineates proper conduct for ‘upholding drag family values’, which the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise utilizes in a way that commodifies queer kinship.