The Necessary Drag of RuPaul’s Drag Race

The ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality TV show featuring drag performers from all across the United States who come in to compete for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar, premiered on the small screen on March 24th 2017. Although it has been easily accessible for a long time through its usual broadcaster Logo TV, a channel primarily aimed at LGBT viewers, the show’s most recent season newly premiered on VH1, a medium which usually reaches a wider audience in its variety.

Using Diana Fuss (1991)’s theorization of the inside and outside, we can analyze the way in which drag queens, who can be said to belong to an exterior, have entered a new realm in terms of visibility, i.e. what can be categorized as interior. By crossing this line, these individuals who do not seem to fit the male / female gender binary, in terms of both aesthetics and self-identification, are placed in a conventional binary system, separating the self from the other; the heterosexual subject from the drag performer (Fuss, 1991).