Ru-Branding Drag: From Subculture to Cultural Phenomenon
RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality competition television series for drag queens, is a cultural phenomenon. Now nearing the end of its 10th Season, its global impact on queer representation is both undeniable and incredible, considering drag’s humble roots.
Just watch Paris is Burning, a documentary on ball culture in NYC: for decades, drag performers have been pushed aside to the fringes of society. Performers would not tell their family. Any form of publicity would result in defamation. At best, drag performance would be conflated for trans-feminism, leaving no room to discern character from performer, gender from gender expression. At worst, some claimed drag was a misogynistic reinterpretation of female stereotypes. As popular misconceptions accumulated, they effectively turned drag performance into its own subculture. Only drag performers and loyal audience members would really get it.
But, like many subcultures, drag is not singular and so much more than ‘subversive’ to prevailing cultural norms. According to Rusty Barrett, author of From Drag Queens to Leathermen, there is “a polyphony of stylistic voices [within drag] and the identities they index serve to convey multiple meanings that may vary across contexts and speakers.” In Judith Butler’s essay, Gender Trouble, she describes how drag performers “rely on imitation and reappearance, lacking any initial, essential truth”. Thus, diversity in drag exists in both creation and reception. The only ubiquitous trait of drag performers, according to RuPaul, is its mockery of identity.
And this mockery is so important nowadays, especially for the queer cultures Drag is so deeply entangled in. More and more people are realising how the labels that helped legitimise and protect the ‘sexually deviant’ and gender-non-conforming are double edged-swords: they only serve to reinforce normative conceptions of sexuality and gender. Mockery is a new fluid approach to these categories of identity. But it’s darn entertaining too.
There is no question that everything from the competitive procedural elements to editing are designed to combat historical prejudices against drag. Now that drag is on national television, RuPaul runs the risk of reinforcing the same misconceptions that discredited the art-form in the first place. RuPaul’s walking a fine line with Drag Race. Good thing she’s got the right pair of heels.
Viewers interacting with unfamiliar ideas inconsistent with their existing beliefs—like the historical conceptions of drag and gender and the new ones Drag Race celebrates—will face cognitive dissonance, a sort of mental discomfort that deters these viewers from consuming the same content. This cognitive dissonance is the central challenge of marketing drag to a wider audience.
Drag Race challenges dilute cognitive dissonance with recognisable pop culture references. In so doing, these challenges reproduces the illusory nature of gender as inherent entertainment.
Parodies of classic and contemporary television staples, such as the 60’s game-show, Match Game, and the more recent Empire, help frame drag personas as delusive yet culturally resonant. Lip-syncing, as contestants’ final plea to remain in the competition, is the climax of every episode and the capstone to RuPaul’s weekly collage of pop music, television, and film. But RuPaul does not just put drag in new clothes.
The girls must adapt to popular notions of performative gender in each domain of drag — fashion, make-up, character, comedy, dance and lip-sync. RuPaul changes drag fundamentally by rewarding the queens who maintain a sensibility to pop culture.
Nina Flower’s punk look [below] on the first ever design challenge on Drag Race Season 1, “Drag On a Dime,” is testament to how drag is the artful manipulation of the social by-products of gender. Her smokey eye, dark lip, and contour add a rock-and-roll aesthetic to complements her choice of plaid, shoulder pads, and half-calf combat heels — all ubiquitously punk items. Decorative handicrafts on the shoulders as well as near the hem of her pants add an element of feminine fantasy and elevate the look made originally from thrifted items from the 99-cent store. Here, she imitates femininity through ornate detail but still incorporates masculine punk-inspired styling. And she sells it with a bounce in her step, a fashionista pout in her lips and creative liberties in her hips. RuPaul names her the winner of this challenge for her unique display of androgyny.
Violet Chachki proves that a mastery of performative femininity need not be constrained by contemporary fashion either. In one of her most famous looks [below], for the theme Death Becomes Her, Chachki wears 7” velvet pumps, black stockings, a sort of turtleneck-lace, and — get this — a corset tightening her waist to a sickening 18”. Through this combination of lace, nude makeup, grey-blonde up-do, and high neck jewellery, she pays homage to Elizabethan motifs of femininity. But because the outfit is pretty much monochrome, the look is still modern. Her prop, breathing apparatus, and faded purple lip exaggerates the ‘deadliness’ of the corset and turns the look drag. Although Violet does not win that challenge, her retro but fashion-forward style ultimately leads her to the Season 7 Crown.
Comedy on Drag Race is just as sensitive to popular culture, which shows in Bob the Drag Queen’s performance, or rather performances, on Snatch Game. Snatch Game is pretty much the same format as the 60’s television game show Match Game that featured contestants coming up with answers to fill-in-the-blank questions. The Drag Race twist is that contestants impersonate celebrities playing contestants, so every fill-in-the-blank is an opportunity for a joke. Bob’s impersonations of “Crazy Eyes,” Uzo Aduba’s character from Orange is the New Black, and of Carol Channing, Broadway actress and gay icon, are hilarious because she exaggerates their fundamental qualities as popularly perceived.
As “Crazy Eyes,” Bob dons an orange jumpsuit, Bantu knots and pencils in gap teeth. She looks just like her, and she acts like her too. She speaks slowly, stuttering on occasion; she convulses, but that doesn’t faze her eyes which remain wide open. Her simplistic poem to Chanel Iman, the guest judge on Snatch Game, is creepily sweet too. There are a couple of rhymes in there, but the meter is totally inconsistent. It makes for a perfect impersonation of Uzo Aduba’s lovable weirdo. Her Carol Channing is funny just because Channing is a little blonde woman in real life but she, a six-foot-four black man, can embody her ‘perma-smile,’ raspy voice and sparkling charm. While her first character was probably the more technically sound, her Carol Channing is just so obviously illusory that it works. Impersonations are not one-to-one replications, just like how drag is not one-to-one imitations of normative femininity. It is also about subverting expectation, as she did with Carol Channing. Bob the Drag Queen won Season 8 of Drag Race, the first comedy queen to do so since Season 6.
As the contestants’ final plea to remain in the competition, lip-sync performances have Drag Race viewers at attention. Lip-syncs are quintessential drag. Queens must connect with the lyrics, sync their lips in perfect rhythm with the song, maintain normatively feminine body language, and move the audience by developing in emotional intensity. Lip-syncs on Drag Race are no joke; they’re the climax of every episode. Jujubee’s lipsync of Aretha Franklin’s Something He Can Feel is one for the Drag Race ‘Hall of Fame’. Her body language reflects song’s desperation for a man’s love. The first thing she does is take off her earrings and necklace as if arriving home from a long day, which speaks to Aretha’s lyrics describing how she feels worn out trying to impress this man she longs for. Then Jujubee paces slowly to focus on her feigned vocal, which is especially impactful because of her rhythmic precision. Aretha uses a lot of rhythmic variations, ad-libs, that are difficult to keep up with. The best part of Jujubee’s performance was how her emotional intensity matched perfectly with the musical dynamic of the song. At some point, she falls to the ground, throws her head back just as Aretha lets out similarly unbridled vocalizations. Jujubee’s performance is hilarious and heartfelt because it uses elements of femininity to impersonate Aretha’s vocal. Of course, RuPaul rewards this insane lip-sync by letting Jujubee stay in the competition.
Competitive decisions are not the only way RuPaul endorses compelling drag art. A judging panel, comprised of RuPaul, Michelle Visage and other expert and non-expert judges, give critiques to both the top and the bottom contestants, then discuss competitive decisions in private. The critique is crucial for both subversive drag artists and drag as a subversive art form. Discrepancies of context between an artist and their audience determine the impact of their art, whatever the medium — fashion, make-up, comedy, acting or lip-syncing. Audiences for any artform are basing their evaluative judgments on what they perceive to be important for that art form. For example, Milk, Season 6 contestant, has been criticized by fans and other contestants for being too masculine for drag. (Granted, she did wear a beard on her first runway) But drag does not exclusively depend on ‘serving fish’ (conforming to normative femininity). It is so much more than that. Since RuPaul hand-picked Milk to be on the third season of Drag Race: All-Stars, (even though Milk didn’t end up winning), RuPaul is openly endorsing Milk’s use of anything along the gender spectrum as part of her drag performance. The judging panel is a kind of cheat sheet to unify context, adjust for the biases, and maintain quality-control to a standard that recognises drag identities in all their complexity. Panel discussions help challenge prevailing notions of drag to let drag subvert itself within the format of the competition.
An episode of Drag Race is not just about the competition though. Editing brings viewers attention to the characters that comprise Drag Race, the people behind the drag and how that ties with their drag persona. To do so, the show systematically covers contestants in and out of drag in comedic rather than competitive ways. The comprehensive coverage sheds light on diverse and complex characters, with convincing hubris or fatal flaw, which help generate clear brands for a sustainable fan following after the show.
Showing the creative process in the ‘werk room’ shows the sheer amount of effort getting into drag. It sounds cliche but showing process through behind-the-scenes footage makes art more relatable. The illusion of drag performance is often taken for granted because it intends not reveal all of its nuts and bolts. For example, Drag Race would cover Trinity ‘The Tuck’ Taylor, known for not revealing her nuts and bolts, about how her fierce tuck. Her tucking talents have since been referenced on Saturday Night Live, helping her develop strong brand associations to her namesake.
While the cattiness helps reinforce industry standard quality-control, it’s also hilarious. In Season 5, Alyssa Edwards threw shade at how (literally) “orange” Coco Montrese looked, and it was such a funny, off-the-cuff moment Coco Montrese appropriated it for her own brand. Several challenges down the road, and even in some interviews for media, she jokes about how she leaves Cheeto dust on her face after a nice meal.
Cattiness takes a new form in the confession room, allowing comedy queens like Ginger Minj to overtly bitch about other contestants’ personal and professional qualities. Her quick quips on herself, the performance of other queens, or even the looks of some guest judges help bring her comedy to a bigger audience. The temporary privacy of these comments would enable queens like Ginger to come off genuine and ‘in the moment’, in turn, associating authenticity with her comedy brand. But coverage on Drag Race is not always so funny.
Roxxy Andrews bursting into tears after her lip-sync on the main-stage was one of the most heartfelt moments in Drag Race ‘Herstory.’ RuPaul stopped proceeding with eliminations to ask her what she was feeling and why she was so upset. “It just hit me, like, not feeling wanted and not being good enough. I just feel like my mom never wanted me. My mother left my sister and myself at a bus stop when I was 3…” Roxxy says, her voice breaking. This was such a contrast to her iconic wig-reveal during the lip-sync, which so strongly represented her brand of self-confidence (She self-identifies as thick and juicy). Her feelings of neglect and waning sense of self-worth reveal a little boy under the facade of Roxxy — a kind of character illusion that many can relate to.
Similarly, near the end of each season, RuPaul would take out a picture of contestants in their youth and asks the competing queens, “What would you tell your younger self?” This segment is consistently a tear-jerker. When queens talk to their younger selves, they are talking to themselves unaffected by or at least naive to the resistance they will face later on in life. Kim Chi’s answer in Season 8 outlines the difficulties of gender nonconformity in a conformist society like Korea. It helped make sense of her commitment to Korean norms of gender expression in her drag but also why she suffers from so much body dysmorphia throughout the competition.
http://www.logotv.com/video-clips/ysoq8x/rupauls-drag-race-baby-kim-chi
Sometimes contestants even lay their silent struggles bare off the mainstage. As they were beating their face (putting on make-up) in the ‘werk’ room, both Sasha and Valentina spoke about the prevalence of anorexia in the gay community and how that manifests in their struggles with eating disorders. Katya once broke down in tears, anxious about an upcoming challenge, wholeheartedly believing she does not have the confidence to commit to her performance. In the confession room, Trixie Mattel explained that her abusive step-father would call her Trixie every time she displayed feminine behavior. Using that name for her drag persona is a defining moment of her career, representing that she understands that her treasure will always be someone’s trash.
There is a dualism to characterization on Drag Race — the simultaneous in-group identification as part of this newfound (or, rather, ‘Ru-found’) drag elite, and the out-group identification of gender nonconformity. It reflects the technical abilities of drag queens as they progress through the show’s various challenges but also the persisting cognitive dissonance of gender performativity. Kind of like the hubris of Greek mythology, it portrays drag queens as the underdog but also the confident frontrunner. The transformation from man to drag, and the coverage in between, is this dualism turned into a visual metaphor. Like after Alaska receives her first major negative critique in All Stars Season 2 — that she was being complacent and resting on her laurels of former challenge wins — she tears off her wig and begins undressing. “Drag is tiring,” she exclaims, “Fuck!”
It helps that Drag Race is not censored like other network television shows. The sexually implicit humor is not conventionally family-friendly, and the cussing definitely is not either. Thus, distribution on a gay-friendly network is an advantage. A gay-friendly channel, and its respective sponsors would be conscious of the social issues that people might face. They also have less to lose as their audience, as queer people, would not typically practice the same ‘conservatism’ that would disdain Drag Race. Since Drag Race contestants mostly comprise of queer men, the issues they might spontaneously bring up are relatively expected from queer media. Without conventional censorship, drag race comes off authentic, especially compared to other television shows that rely heavily on typecasts to build hubris rather than the patterns inherent to comedic editing.
More importantly, Drag Race contestants barely self-censor. The competition format rewards those with the emotional wherewithal to present themselves, or at least their public personas, consistently and at multiple levels. Self-censorship would be a vice and a missed opportunity for competing queens. Sometimes it is these spontaneous moments that can be most influential unto one’s drag persona. In Season 7, Pearl described her laid-backness to the judges as ‘flazéda,’ mistaking it for three words simultaneously: blase, laissez-faire, and la-di-da. It complements other contestants’ opinions of her that, paraphrasing Violet Chachki, she had the personality of a stoner, without actually smoking weed. It was a hit with Drag Race viewers. Pearl now sells Flazéda, the fragrance.
Most queens on Drag Race are very willing to make fun of themselves. In tandem with Drag Race’s attention to convincing, flawed and layered character development on-screen, the queens can literally profit from the exposure from Drag Race. What they lose in face, they gain in brand awareness, positive brand associations and, most important for art, ‘authenticity.’ Subsequently, comprehensive coverage also allows drag queens to differentiate in infinite ways. This change in perception of drag from imitation to innovation is vital to see drag art as a self-consistent product.
Still, there are limits to the multidisciplinary nature of Drag Race competition because it does not necessarily reflect market demand for drag artists. For that reason, Drag Race’s influence on the drag community might be much too authoritarian for its own good. So much control over the queens that continue on the competition means, for RuPaul to elevate the voices with the best potential, he must have the industry expertise to know what ‘potential’ entails. He does have criteria for evaluating competition — charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent but his implementation of the criteria is incredibly discretionary. There is no weighting to each variable because it’s not an algorithm. His industry expertise must be very conscious of the constant development of drag to predict the upcoming trends in the entertainment market.
RuPaul has a huge burden, but I think he fulfills it admirably. He’s one of the most longstanding drag queens, not only in the drag scene but in popular culture. His experience spans fashion, television, music, and film. His drag persona has evolved from punk and sex to glamour and comedy. He definitely has the experience to back up his discretionary interpretations of drag queens with ‘high potential.’ But more importantly, he has the social influence to define trends as he sees fit. Now in popular culture, Drag Race influences viewers as much as viewers influence drag. Before each finale, he consults twitter hashtags to evaluate queens’ popularity and likability, a highly unpredictable quality with only industry experience.
Ultimately, Drag can credit Drag Race for its evolution into a self-sustaining and growing industry. Past RuPaul contestants now promote themselves, their performances, their sponsors and their merchandise on social media. Democratized media work well for the geographically decentralized following of drag queens, often queer people, who remain underrepresented in mainstream media. Live tours of groups of drag queens, like the annual Drag Con and Drag Queens of Christmas, show that there is increasing demand for drag art outside Drag Race. Some queens have even broken into entertainment. Bianca Del Rio, from Season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race recently released Hurricane Bianca, a feature film distributed nationally and on Netflix.
In ideological form, however, it is questionable whether Drag Race has expanded the audience for drag from the confines of the queer community. Until Season 8, Drag Race showed on Logo TV, a gay television network. Its sponsors are companies that sell to that same segment, often exclusively gay males rather than anyone else in the queer spectrum. Perhaps Drag Race only connects the groups of people that have already supported drag, but I doubt it. Drag Race segments are also on Youtube and entire seasons are available Netflix and Amazon. Plus, ever since Season 9, Drag Race shows on VH1, a network that does not target queer segments of the market exclusively, or at least openly.
Another interpretation of this success, however, is that the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ in mainstream media allowed for a subversive art like drag to gain traction. Same-sex marriage was legalized two years ago in the US but has also been topic of discussion in mainstream media even here in the Philippines. Gender neutral bathrooms was another prominent issue that highlighted the binary constructs that oppress trans people. RuPaul might be a benefactor to the coinciding problematization of social issues queer people face.
Again, it’s hard to contend the trickle-down effects of RuPaul’s drag world. Sure, some former contestants credit their success to their fanbase outside of RuPaul viewership. Trixie Mattel’s new show on VICELAND with Katya, another RuGirl, is still testament to the influence queens maintain after showing on Drag Race. In the same vein, Milk, known for her relatively masculine looks for drag, modeled for a womenswear campaign for friend, Marc Jacobs. But Milk wouldn’t have even befriended Jacobs if he didn’t spot her wearing a Marc Jacobs sweater on Drag Race.
RuPaul was very aspirational with Drag Race. He claims “we’re all born naked, and the rest is drag,” suggesting we all perform gender as drag queens do. Drag is not yet ubiquitous, but it’s a cultural phenomenon. Children are watching Drag Race. Families are attending Drag Con as if it were the state fair. The judges have deliberated, and the repressive misconceptions of drag are slowly wearing thin. Drag — Shante you stay.
Bibliography
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Butler, J. (2015). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Hebdige, D. (2011). Subculture: the meaning of style. London: Routledge.
Lang, C. (2017, April 20) RuPaul on Why Identity Shouldn’t Be Taken Seriously, But Loving. Retrieved from http://time.com/4746895/rupaul-time-100-video/
[Logo TV] (2016, April, 29) Baby Kimchi [Video File] Retrieved from http://www.logotv.com/video-clips/ysoq8x/rupauls-drag-race-baby-kim-chi
RuPaul’s Drag Race [Television series]. (2009, February 2). New York, New York: VH1.
[WOWPresents]. (2015, January 30). A Message to Mary Cheney from RuPaul’s Drag Race [Video File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/5G4-oatHs3A?t=16s
