MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Aside from its investment in spectacular and often scandalous femininities, camp taste has traditionally been most involved with the figure of the Diva. The Diva’s precarious - and therefore all the more iconic - beauty stems from the mutual permeability of the glamorous star image/role and the vulnerable star body constructed through biographic and backstage knowledge.

Following similar logics, US queer film and performance avant-gardes between the late 50s and early 70s celebrated the cultural industry’s icons’ and products’ failure to gain complete sovereignty over the image-making process. The collapse between theatrical intentions and unintentional traces of human bodies, desires and labor was appropriated by queer film makers in ways that offered politicized identification for “collectivities of the shamed” (D. Crimp).

However, the disclosure of the icon’s vulnerability, shame and fabrication has long been institutionalized and customized in mass media by reality TV casting shows. My presentation poses the question whether and how such artistic techniques can be reclaimed by queer subcultures through the reality competition RuPaul’s Drag Race.

It is argued that RuPaul’s Drag Race production and reception is divided between two narratives of overcoming through performance. Firstly, that of neoliberal individualism: Social, racialized and economic injustices are narrated as internal struggles to be mastered by personal attitude adjustment and self-government. Here, iconic displays of social and personal vulnerability can mainly operate within the logics of branding. Secondly and less explicitly, RPDR’s camp humor tells about transformation through “queer recognition” (E. K. Sedgwick) of shared marginalized experience. In this, empathetic exposure of the individual’s vulnerability transcends reality TV’s economized affects and regains its community-building function.