Browsing by Subject "queer studies"

The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula is a drag reality TV competition featuring subversive drag acts that draw inspiration from horror cinema. The Show itself, constructed around the horror-host drag persona duo The Boulet Brothers, portends to represent transgressive drag that is marginalised within the contemporary popular drag scene in the United States. This thesis proposes that Dragula is a manifestation of an ongoing discourse centred on queer affinity for horror as a source of subversive self-determination. It hypothesises that increased representation in mainstream media, including horror, has prompted the queer community to evaluate how this representation and unprecedented visibility affects them. Dragula turns to the canon of American horror cinema and a dark past of queer life in the United States to return a sense of autonomy to queer representation, particularly to drag. With a theoretical framework based on Disidentifications: Queers of color and cultural performance by José Esteban Muñoz and Queer retrosexualities: the politics of reparative return by Nishant Shahani, this thesis uses the lenses of disidentification and reparative retrospection to approach a better understanding of queer affinity for horror and the subversive potential to be found in camp approaches to the genre. In addition, Heather O. Petrocelli's empirical research on queer horror film spectatorship, Queer For Fear: Horror cinema and queer spectatorship is consulted to support analyses. The method used is a close reading of two spin-off episodes from the franchise, Halloween House Party from Titans (2022) and Resurrection (2020). The analysis is divided into three parts, beginning with a brief summary of Dragula's background and the series as a whole, then proceeding to analyse Halloween House Party and how it creates an alternative 'past' with the use of set design and contrasting imagery between monster drag and Americana. The analysis of Resurrection and its more documentarian narrative sheds light on the self-awareness of queer horror fans and the importance of recorded media as legacy. I argue that the allusive mise-en-scène of the episodes shows that Dragula deliberately creates conflicting nostalgic images of the present to explore queer visibility, and problematise the mainstream conception of ‘good’ representation. The main findings point to Dragula using a camp approach to American horror film history and iconography, so that it could, through disidentification and reparative nostalgia, envision a future in which mainstream representation of the queer community would not be determined by normative conceptions of commercial viability. Moreover, the way that Dragula operates suggests that the iconography and associated feelings of nostalgia and self-determination function as a form of tertiary memory for the queer horror fandom, supporting the development of a sense of community.