The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race

Description

Insightful, provocative and now in paperback, The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a collection of original material that goes beyond simple analysis of the show and examines the profound effect that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had on the cultures that surround it: audience cultures, economics, branding, queer politics and all points in between. Once a cult show marketed primarily to gay men, Drag Race has drawn both praise and criticism for its ability to market itself to broader, straighter and increasingly younger fans. The show’s depiction of drag as both a celebrated form of entertainment and as a potentially lucrative career path has created an explosion of aspiring queens in unprecedented numbers, and had a far-reaching impact on drag as both an art form and a career.

Contributors include scholars based in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and South Africa. The contributions are interdisciplinary, as well as international. The editor invited submissions from scholars in theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology and marketing. What he envisaged was an examination of the wider cultural impacts that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had;  what he received was a rich and diverse engagement with the question of how Drag Race has affected local, live cultures, fan cultures, queer representation and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.

This original collection, with its variety of topics and approaches, is a critical appraisal of RuPaul’s Drag Race at an important point of the programme’s run, as well as of the growing industries around RPDR, including DragCon and drag queens' post-show careers in the on- and offline world.  

Primarily of interest to students, scholars and researchers in media and communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, popular culture, queer theory, LGBTQ history, media studies, and fan studies. Will also appeal to fans of the series.

1. Twerk It & Werk It: The Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Local Underground Drag Scenes - Joshua Rivers


2. 'Change the Motherfucking World!': The Possibilities and Limitations of Activism in RuPaul's Drag Race - Ash Kinney d’Harcourt


3. Queering Africa: Bebe Zahara Benet's "African" Aesthetics and Performance - Lwando Scott


4. 'Heather has Transitioned': Transgender and Non-Binary Contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race - K. Woodzick


5. How Drag Race Created a Monster: The Future of Drag and the Backward Temporality of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula - Aaron J. Stone


6. RuPaul’s Drag Race: Between Cultural Branding and Consumer Culture - Mario Campana and Katherine Duffy


7. RuPaul’s Franchise: Moving Toward a Political Economy of Drag Queening - Ray LeBlanc


8. Legend, Icon, Star: Cultural Production and Commodification in RuPaul’s Drag Race - Laura Friesen


9. Repetition, Recitation and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo: Miss Vanjie and the Culture-Producing Power of Performative Speech in RuPaul's Drag Race - Allan S. Taylor


10. It’s Too Late to Rupaulogize: The Lackluster Defense of an Occasional Unlistener - Timothy Oleksiak


11. 'This is a Movement!': How RuPaul Markets Drag Through DragCon Keynote Addresses - Carl Schotmiller

Sujets

• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Gender Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• RuPaul's Drag Race
• Performance art
• General officer
• General
• Cultural Studies
• RuPaul
• Performance
• Camp
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 23 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382587
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race

The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Why Are We All Gagging?
E DITED BY
Cameron Crookston
First published in the UK in 2021 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2021 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen KnowlegdeWorks
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Production manager: Aimée Bates
Typesetting: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-256-3
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-257-0
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-258-7
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Are We All Gagging? Unpacking the Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Cameron Crookston
1. Twerk It & Werk It: The Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Local Underground Drag Scenes
Joshua W. Rivers
2. “Change the motherfucking world!”: The Possibilities and Limitations of Activism in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Ash Kinney d’Harcourt
3. Queering Africa: Bebe Zahara Benet’s “African” Aesthetics and Performance
Lwando Scott
4. “Heather has transitioned”: Transgender and Non-binary Contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race
K. Woodzick
5. How Drag Race Created a Monster: The Future of Drag and the Backward Temporality of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula
Aaron J. Stone
6. RuPaul’s Drag Race : Between Cultural Branding and Consumer Culture
Mario Campana and Katherine Duffy
7. RuPaul’s Franchise: Moving Toward a Political Economy of Drag Queening
Ray LeBlanc
8. Legend, Icon, Star: Cultural Production and Commodification in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Laura Friesen
9. Repetition, Recitation, and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo: Miss Vanjie and the Culture-Producing Power of Performative Speech in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Allan S. Taylor
10. It’s Too Late to RuPaulogize: The Lackluster Defense of an Occasional Unlistener
Timothy Oleksiak
11. “This is a movement!”: How RuPaul Markets Drag through DragCon Keynote Addresses
Carl Schottmiller
Contributors
Acknowledgments
I wish to extend my gratitude to the team at Intellect for supporting this book and encouraging me through its development. In particular I wish to thank James Campbell, Katie Evans, Naomi Curston, and Aimée Bates for their support and guidance. I would also like to thank Professors Jacob Gallagher-Ross and VK Preston at the University of Toronto for their good counsel and sound advice on editing. To the group of scholars who contributed to this book, I offer my most sincere thanks for your hard work. Finally, I wish to thank the artists, both those named in this book and those unnamed, whose work contributes to the vibrant and expansive world of drag.
Introduction
Why Are We All Gagging?
Unpacking the Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Cameron Crookston
Since its premier in 2009, RuPaul’s Drag Race has captured the attention and imagination of fans. Drag Race has spawned conventions and international spin-off programs and transformed not only the careers of its over one hundred contestants but also the very landscape of drag performance itself. In addition to the enthusiasm and critical acclaim the show has gained from fans and critics, Drag Race has become the subject of scholarship and academic analysis around the world. Over the past decade Drag Race has been the subject of articles and essays in publications such as S tudies in Popular Culture (Edgar 2012 ), Journal of Research in Gender Studies (Moore 2013 ), Feminist Media Studies (Strings and Bui 2014 ), GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Goldmark 2015 ), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (Collins 2017 ), among many others. It has been the subject of book chapters, academic conference presentations, and doctoral and master’s theses. In 2014 Jim Daems edited The Makeup of Rupaul’s Drag Race : Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows , the first published anthology of critical works to examine the then cult reality hit. Just three years later Niall Brennan and David Gudelunas released the second collection of academic works, RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture ( 2017 ). The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race : Why Are We All Gagging? joins a conversation that has evolved over ten years in response to a show that has itself grown and changed as the very subject it documents, the art and world of drag, has been transformed radically.
The seed of this project was born when I participated in a roundtable discussion on contemporary drag performance at Q2Q: A Symposium on Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada , held at Simon Fraser University, in 2016. Seated between drag performers Isolde N. Barron and Rose Butch the conversation turned to recent changes and influences in local drag communities across Canada. Barron discussed her experience of “marathon drag” in Toronto, a fairly recent phenomena in which rather than preparing two or three numbers to perform in a contained single show, queens were expected to perform over a dozen numbers, for hours, with “shows” running virtually nonstop from opening to closing. Increases in straight audience members and higher numbers of aspiring performers were also noted as major changes to drag in the second decade of the twentieth century, all of which could be traced to the popularity and proliferation of RuPaul’s Drag Race . Audiences who might have never wandered into a bar to discover drag were having it piped into their living rooms. Queer youth who would have had to wait another decade or move to a larger city could access drag earlier and more easily. Even for those who did not actively seek out the program, Drag Race spawned memes, viral catch phrases, hashtags, Saturday Night Live sketches, and spin-off series. As such, drag audiences changed. They grew in size and in demographic diversity. They experienced drag via television first and brought those expectations to local live shows. And through this all, Drag Race continued to grow.
Initially, I conceived of this collection as a volume in Intellect’s Fan Phenomena series. I was interested in exploring Drag Race ’s transition from cult program to mainstream hit and bringing scholarly attention to events such as DragCon, the trend of “viewing parties” at local bars around the world, and the unique way that Drag Race performers related to their fans via social media. However, as I worked with Intellect, we quickly decided that while fan culture was a part of this discussion, there was much more going on and that it warranted a broader scope than merely an analysis of fan studies. So we put out a call for the collection as it stands, a project that asked scholars to reflect on the impact Drag Race has had on the world around us. I asked, with a wink and a nod that seemed appropriate within the context of drag studies: why are we all gagging? 1 What is the cultural impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race ?
I received submissions from scholars in theater and performance studies, English literature, and cultural anthropology. From media studies, linguistics, sociology, and marketing. These chapters provided a rich and diverse engagement with the question of how Drag Race has affected local live cultures, fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular consciousness. The result is this collaborative project informed by the research and experience of scholars and fans, who have each contributed unique cultural, academic, and often personal perspectives on my question about the cultural impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race .
The Cultural Context of RuPaul’s Drag Race
The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed an explosion of reality programing 2 development and a popularity that continues even today. Shows such as Big Brother (1999), Survivor (2000), and American Idol (2002) ushered in the modern era of reality television and solidified contemporary formatting and structural audience expectations for reality TV formulas. Thus, when RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered in February of 2009, reality television had been a staple of Western mainstream entertainment for a decade. In her contribution to Daemon’s collection, Mary Marcel submits that “whatever naïve early notions the public may have had about the ‘realness’ of reality television, many years in, we know that reality TV programs are cast, edited, and often scripted” ( 2014 ). Because of drag’s very foundation of cultural parody and self-referential construction of “realness,” Drag Race offered what many critics and scholars saw as the perfect platform to parody the popular form at a moment in the zeitgeist when audiences had had enough time to become critically aware of the constructed nature, and thus the ironic lack of reality, of reality television. Marcel, among others, observes the degree to which RuPaul’s vision for the show, at least in the early seasons, presented a parody of reality TV conventions.
However, despite the subversive potential that Drag Race ’s parody of reality television might have offered, critics and scholars almost immediately spotted the danger of adapting a queer art form for mass cultural consumption. Articles that cautioned against the pitfalls of Drag Race ’s attempt to thrust drag into the mainstream were among some of the first academic works on the program. Ten years later, the question of Drag Race ’s relationship to the mainstream has grown increasingly