RuPaul’s Drag Race: A study in the commodification of white ruling-class femininity and the etiolation of drag

This article explores the spectacularized commodification of the queer body that takes place in RuPaul’s Drag Race. In appropriating the political history of drag culture as both social commentary and activism, RuPaul’s Drag Race silences the resistance to hegemonic gender binaries that is characteristic of the origins of radical drag. Drag Race commodifies the body through performances of drag that simultaneously attempt to subvert as they reify and fetishize hegemonic expressions of white, ruling-class femininity. This brings into stark relief the continuing relevance of both bell hooks and Judith Butler’s early theoretical interventions into the world of drag. Our examination of RuPaul’s Drag Race will draw on these insights by putting them into conversation with Catherine Rottenberg and Matt Sparke’s work on the embodiment of neo-liberal market ideology in a way that speaks to Ali MacLaurin and Aoife Monks’ conceptualization of the everyday through what Marcel Mauss refers to as techniques of the body. It is our contention that through the manipulation of physiology, the contestants in RuPaul’s Drag Race render corporeality a form of costuming that simultaneously etiolates drag and commodifies the body. Instead of subverting gender norms, the show’s capacity to create and disseminate legitimate and illegitimate modes of embodiment both reinforces and continues to shape already existing social hierarchies at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender.