"She Is Not Acting, She Is": The conflict between gender and racial realness on RuPaul's Drag Race

This essay examines the popular television show RuPaul's Drag Race to reveal the ways drag performance provides an ambivalent, contradictory space for wrestling with contentious issues surrounding cultural identity and authenticity in reality TV. Focusing on the show's controversial season...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Feminist media studies 2014-09, Vol.14 (5), p.822-836
Main Authors: Strings, Sabrina, Bui, Long T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Asia
Automobile racing
Conflict
Cultural Identity
drag queen
Ethnicity
Gender
Programming (Broadcast)
queer
Race
Reality programming
reality television
RuPaul
Semiotics
Sex
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Television
Television programs
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Description
Summary:This essay examines the popular television show RuPaul's Drag Race to reveal the ways drag performance provides an ambivalent, contradictory space for wrestling with contentious issues surrounding cultural identity and authenticity in reality TV. Focusing on the show's controversial season three, the authors demonstrate how drag queens subvert and play with ideas of gender "realness" but find an impasse in open discussions of race. The racial minstrelsy of some contestants we observe created antagonisms between black/brown characters and their white/Asian counterparts, exposing a rift in ideas about racial play despite the general acceptance of flexibility in gender bending. Recognizing that reality TV exploits and uncovers these tensions, we demonstrate that while drag performance enacts a subversive mode of queer performance, it provides a contested site and complex semiotic space for dealing with sensitive matters of race/ethnicity, especially when certain forms of stereotyping are rewarded over others.
ISSN:1468-0777
1471-5902
DOI:10.1080/14680777.2013.829861