Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Sociology; Gender and Sexuality Studies

Project Advisor 1

Andrew Bush

Project Advisor 2

Kwame Holmes

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Queer people in the United States continue to be essentialized in history as the liberal passage forward into a democratic and proud American society. When we look at queer people, what is it that we notice right off the bat? Well, thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race, one thing we can expect is the ability to entertain and build a sense of community. Since the show’s release in 2009, the show has finished its sixteenth lap and has been expanding its queer platform across the globe. This circulation of drag culture has become a source of capital where digital networks such as the televisual platforms where we can watch Drag Race have become representatives of grassroot queer communities. Their investment into the livelihoods of underrepresented drag queens who come from all around the globe and their homes become analogies to the liberal conception of space and belonging in America.

Drag analyzed through a queer theoretical framework can help dismantle an institutional way of thinking, the disillusions of fixed binaries, and the possibility of embodying a sense of liberatory praxis that can potentially take up space. Realness is up for debate, but a temporal analysis of queer embodiment through drag culture centers the spatial interconnections that materialize a queer history. There is an essential quality of belonging that continues to be reproduced in popular culture that considers queer people’s accessibility to space, even in the digital world. Analyzing drag culture through the lens of building a collective queer identity in a temporal manner where the stories from yesterday become the navigations toward a (potentially) queer future. This has been a memorable experience, an experience that I fought for every step of the way, with the hope of continuing the discussion beyond the digital realm.

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Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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