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“Pick up a book and go read”: Art and Legitimacy in RuPaul’s Drag Race

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RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture

Abstract

Using the performance of unpopular drag queen Serena ChaCha on the Logo TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race as a case study, Brusselaers discusses how the talent competition’s concept of art derives from its aesthetic involvement in gay male culture, negotiating reality as a heteronormative power structure. This chapter argues that the program corresponds to a space determined by camp, non-gay intrusions into which are prone to attract hostility. The show’s handling of Serena as a character of reality television in Untucked! reveals how genre-blurring between drag and more high-brow fine arts, such as performance art, as well as a vocabulary derived from queer theory, are framed as disowning female impersonators and gay men, as they derive their legitimacy from outside the world of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and practices.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Researcher, Antwerp, Belgium

    Dieter Brusselaers

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  1. Dieter Brusselaers
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA

    Niall Brennan

  2. College of Arts and Letters, University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida, USA

    David Gudelunas

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Brusselaers, D. (2017). “Pick up a book and go read”: Art and Legitimacy in RuPaul’s Drag Race . In: Brennan, N., Gudelunas, D. (eds) RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50618-0_4

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