The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race

Why Are We All Gagging?

Cameron Crookston

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382563
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382587
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Performance Art
• Index: Social Sciences

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 W. Rivers

“What’s a drag race, though?”

It is January in Washington, D.C., in the year 2013. Outside the sky is gray, the cherry blossoms are nowhere in sight, and I am sitting on a forgotten-in-the-attic, brown, grungy-yet-comfortable armchair in a university-owned townhouse doing all I can to ignore the fact that a chapter of my senior thesis is due in three days. Sitting next to me on a similarly worn couch are four of my six housemates and friends, two of whom have convinced the rest of us to join them in watching the premiere of something they keep referring to as a “drag race.” Knowing only that drag races are usually related to cars in some form or fashion and not entirely sure why my two radically queer roommates are so committed to proselytizing such a thing, I nevertheless accept that this TV show seems the best option for advancing my carefully planned procrastination scheme. Confused as to why my roommates have tuned into the LGBTQ+ content focused network Logo TV on our university’s cable network, Rae, sporting purple hair and a colorful set of leggings, giggles a bit while telling the rest of us how excited she is for what we’re about to experience. I take a sip of tea that the townhouse’s other Drag Race apostle has made for the group, unsure as to why the energy-drink-loving auburn-haired Lily chose to center tea as the beverage of choice for the evening, and in a flash of neon pink and light blue, RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) season five begins. An hour after the episode ends, I am hurriedly typing to my Dutch friend Tom, who is just waking up to begin his day in Utrecht, about this show he must see. “What’s a drag race, though? Sorry, it’s early,” is his first response. Two weeks and a bit of explaining later we are both avid RPDR fans.

Growing up in a religious household in the American South during the 1990s, I was never exposed to RuPaul or his career before starting season five, but I found myself enthralled by his persona and those of his queens after each week’s episode. While I had heard of drag queens before and regularly participated in my university’s annual Rocky Horror Picture Show, its own form of queer performance art, it was not until seeing drag queens compete on RPDR that I began to understand better what it meant to perform drag. Alongside investigating local drag shows, which I found fascinating in their ability to entrance a crowd, I also took it upon myself to binge-watch the entirety of season four during any spare time I found between episodes of season five airing, and in February of 2013, it became my personal mission in life to join Lily and Rae in spreading the word about this show, its appeal, and the queer affirmation to be found with drag performance gone mass media.

Six thousand miles away, with an ocean separating us, Tom was one of the first to hear me praise the show, as well as one of the first in my circle of Dutch and German friends to become as avid a fan as I was. Having originally met through a couch-surfing-host-turned-friend from Amsterdam, whose childhood best friend happened to live with Tom, we had grown close during my time studying abroad in Berlin in 2012 as I made frequent visits to Utrecht. Given this friendship and my desire to return to Europe as soon as possible, Tom and I had been planning to see each other during my spring break in March. During one of our many Skype calls about the trip in February, Tom mentioned, “So I’ve been thinking and you know how it was my birthday, that I never celebrate, right? It’s also Danny’s birthday and we’ve been thinking of throwing a party, a drag party. Would you be ok with that while you’re here?” to which I answered, “Absolutely. I’m so excited. Let’s do it.” A month later in an aristocratically inspired white wig from a Carnival¹ shop, heels from a discount shoe store, and a glittery skirt I borrowed from Tom’s friend Marloes, I stepped into Danny’s loft for the first iteration of what would become an annual Utrecht tradition: Twerk It & Werk It.²

Inspired in no small part by Tom and Danny’s recent exposure to RPDR, Twerk It & Werk It grew from a small house party of roughly twenty guests dipping their toes into the drag queen and drag king waters to a larger underground party of nearly one hundred people from all over the country. Hosted in townhomes and empty apartments throughout Utrecht, each iteration of Twerk It & Werk It involved drag performers with make-up “beat for the gods,” costumery to rival a Las Vegas show, as well as catwalk and lip-sync competitions befitting an All Stars episode of RPDR. Throughout this chapter, I trace the history of this particular underground drag party and its associated drag scene as they come into being by virtue of their founders’ exposure to RPDR. I then note particular shifts away from RPDR’s norms of acceptable and permissible drag as they came to light in more recent iterations. Finally, I discuss how the organizers’ decision to place the party on hiatus and thereby place its surrounding drag scene in hibernation is a definitive break from the show’s underlying support of mainstreaming queer performance art such as drag and profiting from it. In doing so, I explore the indeterminate manner in which one constellation of underground drag performers both draw on and reject RPDR’s norms as said norms codify “proper” drag styles, drag bodies, and drag culture. This, in turn, highlights how nuanced analyses of RPDR’s impact better serve us in understanding the complex ways in which the show and its apparatus have irrevocably altered contemporary drag scenes both within the United States and abroad.

The goal of this chapter is not to paint RPDR as a purely neocolonial capitalist enterprise or to laud it for having made queerness mainstream. Instead, by rooting my analyses in four years of ethnographic research, as well as supplementary interview data, I hope to highlight the complexities of how one particular network of actors, those who attend Twerk It & Werk It, engage with, reinterpret, embrace, and eschew RPDR and its message of what drag is or can be.

On Where This Happened and How

In part because of our primary methodological tool, participant observation, we anthropologists are often found deeply embedded in the lives of our interlocutors, as well as in the goings-on in our field sites. This is certainly true of my location within this project. Being close friends with Tom and several of the original Twerk It & Werk It partygoers, I found myself invited to every iteration of the party, which began in 2013 and is currently on hiatus following the 2016 edition, for reasons I will address later. In contrast to traditional drag shows in bars or other Dutch queer parties such as PANN, this party was invite-only and often hosted at a home within Utrecht capable of fitting upward of fifty to one hundred guests. There was also a strict policy of requiring guests to attend in drag. Partygoers not in drag were asked to don drag-wear from the “box of misfit bras,” a box near the entrance that contained various types of clothing and women’s wigs, or immediately leave the party. Indeed, this policy of what counts as drag constitutes part of my analysis given various party organizers and attendees often had varying ideas of what doing drag entailed.

My interlocutors were the organizers of the party, Tom, Danny, and eventually Nina, as well as the attendees of the Twerk It & Werk It parties I attended. Save for myself and two guests I brought with me from Germany and Amsterdam in 2016, all partygoers were Dutch and lived somewhere in the Netherlands. Many lived in Utrecht directly, though several traveled from as far as Groningen in the northern part of the country.³

Being friends with Tom and Danny, I was lucky enough to gain access to the party, as well as permission to write on what I observed in academic venues. Accordingly, this chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted at two of the four Twerk It & Werk It parties, the 2013 and 2016 iterations. Most of my data is drawn directly from conversations had and observations made at these parties, though several interviews were conducted via Skype either preceding or following the parties. Where my field notes are sparse, I supplement data with narrative interviews from partygoers and organizers. For the parties in 2014 and 2015, I relied on retellings of the night and interviews with the organizers to inform my understanding of those years’ events. Nevertheless, I will not speak to those installments with any sort of ethnographic authority and will instead rely on the field notes and observations I have in order to present my analysis.

Using the data I have, I aim to make a nuanced argument centered on three ethnographic vignettes. Each of these tales speaks to the complicated manner in which Twerk It & Werk It attendees and organizers draw on and reject RPDR when crafting their drag personas and shaping this particular drag scene. Despite the rather broad title of this chapter, my intent is not to speak authoritatively to all instances of underground drag parties or to generalize beyond the context of Twerk It & Werk It. Instead, by speaking to this specific instance of RPDR’s multiplicitous impact on a particular drag party and its connected scene, I highlight how popular discourse surrounding RPDR as either malevolently homonormative or righteously queer and transgressive through its “mainstreaming” of drag founders on an unnecessary binary. As is often the case, and as Sally Falk-Moore (1978) reminds us, reality is a fair deal messier than we would like it to be; the same can be said for this network of drag performers and friends.

On Globalizing Forces and Aesthetic Formations

To understand the impact of an American reality TV show on the drag party of a group of queer Dutch people, it is important to first speak to my underlying understanding of globalization. Combining a nuanced view of what identity-making processes are with an equally nuanced depiction of what said processes do in a globalizing world, Geschiere and Meyer’s (1998) insights on globalization and identity guide my own understanding of how the Twerk It & Werk It scene works to draw on RPDR while simultaneously stabilizing their own group identity. Geschiere and Meyer are quick to point out that

globalization is not only about flows but also entails constant efforts towards closure and fixing at all levels […] it raises important questions about […] how attempts are made to maintain the illusion that the world does indeed consist of “nameable groups,” bound to certain territories from time immemorial. (614)

Their depiction of globalization as a flow that influences attempts to bound off groups within the world and maintain a reality that such bounded groups are tied to particular territories and geographies is significant for this work because of the repeated disavowal of RPDR as inspiration on the part of Twerk It & Werk It partygoers and organizers, despite the party’s roots in its organizers’ exposure to the show. Tom and Danny came to the idea of hosting a drag party only after watching season five of RPDR, and yet they felt the need to distinguish their event from RPDR’s depiction of drag, most notably in the inclusion of drag kings. Accordingly, attempts to fix the group’s identity to a form of Utrechtian drag and close said scene off from outside influences such as RPDR were and are present in the language and actions of Twerk It & Werk It’s organizers as relates to the party.

Utrecht’s queer nightlife scene is smaller than one might expect, yet simultaneously well-renowned. The city’s first gay bar, De Roze Wolk, opened in 1982 (Dercksen 2018). As opposed to gay bars in New York City or Berlin, which often implement “men only” entrance policies, De Roze Wolk was open and welcoming of both men and women (Dercksen 2018). In 1969, concurrent with the Stonewall riots in New York City and well before the now-shuttered De Roze Wolk’s opening, PANN was founded as an LGBTQ+ student collective in Utrecht. Five of the collective’s students took to hosting a sort of “protest party,” itself named PANN, which grew to become one of the largest queer parties in the Netherlands with iterations now hosted across the country. Similar to De Roze Wolk, PANN was deliberately open to being a space welcoming of gay men and lesbian women. Indeed, with one notable exception,⁴ every gay bar and queer party in Utrecht I have participated in or heard of has had a relatively even distribution of men and women, while also welcoming those outside of the gender binary. Given the history of Utrecht’s queer nightlife scene as one relatively open to people of all genders, it is not surprising that my interlocutors pointed in part to Twerk It & Werk It’s Utrechtian context to explain why the thought never crossed their mind to exclude drag kings.

It is also worth noting that Utrecht lacks a formal drag scene akin to Amsterdam’s relatively young yet profligate scene with its annual drag queen only “Superball,” where the city’s drag houses compete against one another for trophies, crowns, and fame (cf. Daniels 2008). In fact, though Utrechtian drag performers attend nearly every queer party or LGBTQ+ bar and there are a number of well-known drag queens, such as Salem Reed, there are no formal drag houses or regularly scheduled drag performances.

Against the backdrop of Utrecht’s LGBTQ+ nightlife, Twerk It & Werk It appears indeed to be a uniquely Utrechtian form of a drag scene given its beginnings as a party organized by a small collective of friends open to both drag queens and kings. That said, it is not only due to its location in Utrecht that the scene has come to exist as such. Instead of further attempting to fix and close a particular scene’s identity to its geographic location, I understand the scene’s engagement with RPDR and other drag influences through the lens of what Birgit Meyer terms “aesthetic formations,” a holistic expansion of Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” that is rooted in “the role played by things, media, and the body in actual processes of community making” (2010, 6). Moving beyond nationality and strictly delineated group identities, this concept allows us to see communities as existing in their enactment. That is to say, Twerk It & Werk It comes to exist in part by the act of the party occurring and partygoers engaging in said party. While T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Why Are We All Gagging?: Unpacking the Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
• 1 Twerk It & Werk It: The Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Local Underground Drag Scenes
• 2 “Change the motherfucking world!”: The Possibilities and Limitations of Activism in RuPaul’s Drag Race
• 3 Queering Africa: Bebe Zahara Benet’s “African” Aesthetics and Performance
• 4 “Heather has transitioned”: Transgender and Non-binary Contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race
• 5 How Drag Race Created a Monster: The Future of Drag and the Backward Temporality of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula
• 6 RuPaul’s Drag Race: Between Cultural Branding and Consumer Culture
• 7 RuPaul’s Franchise: Moving Toward a Political Economy of Drag Queening
• 8 Legend, Icon, Star: Cultural Production and Commodification in RuPaul’s Drag Race
• 9 Repetition, Recitation, and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo: Miss Vanjie and the Culture-Producing Power of Performative Speech in RuPaul’s Drag Race
• 10 It’s Too Late to RuPaulogize: The Lackluster Defense of an Occasional Unlistener
• 11 “This is a movement!”: How RuPaul Markets Drag through DragCon Keynote Addresses
• Contributors