We’re All Born Naked and the Rest is Rhetoric: Self-identity and Sophistry in RuPaul’s Drag Race Mitch Baca-Daley University of Utah, Writing & Rhetoric Studies
The self-proclaimed “supermodel of the world,” RuPaul, arguably the most famous
American drag queen, has created a bellwether career in turning gender norms on their lace front wigged heads. Seeking to pass on the wisdom of self-acceptance and the power of self-branding, she has culminated her body of work into Logo TV’s highest rated program, RuPaul’s Drag Race
(RPDR). This reality competition show gathers a group of drag queens from all across the nation to vie for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” along with a hefty cash prize. To crown each season’s winner, RuPaul, besides the show’s mainstay judging panel and a slew of celebrity guest judges, evaluates each contestants’ charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Being a reality television program operating on a familiar high-drama-makes-for-good-TV, a valued recurring theme is the power of loving one’s self throughout the show’s eight season run. This “presents familiar ground rules for success on the reality television set and, by extension, in the US market: an indefatigable work ethic mixed with humor, hardship, and spectacular display transforms the underprivileged initiate into a (super)model of success (Goldmark, 501). Looking through the lens of rhetoric, RuPaul’s Drag Race functions as a platform that appeals to body and gender to promote a greater sense of self.
RuPaul and her kingdom of queens (not to mention drag performers the world over) behave as modern sophists – consummate rhetoricians through feats of gendered performance.
The show being both produced and performed by drag queens sets itself as a form of “self- representation which counters a long history of negative representations of drag in popular culture.” As the mentor, a source of inspiration, and judge, RuPaul takes an active role interacting with the contestants. She brings along her history – or herstory, as RuPaul would say
– as a struggling gender-bending performer to world-famous drag goddess to the forefront of her interactions with the queens she has asked to compete. In her article "Serious Play: Drag,
Transgender, And The Relationship Between Performance and Identity In The Life Writing Of
RuPaul And Kate Bornstein," Elizabeth Schewe points out:
RuPaul’s performances … further complicate understandings of female impersonation because, while he draws on mainstream models of femininity, particularly the supermodels of the 1980s and 1990s, his performance also grows out of his identity as a southern, working-class, African American “sissy”, his experiences in racial and sexual minority communities, his identification with the strong women of his family, and his early experimentation with “punk or gender fuck drag” (673) By drawing from her early drag roots, RuPaul encourages “her girls” to tap into the vulnerability of their backstories. These backstories are often known as “drag survival stories” since contestants divulge the obstacles they faced – in the form of familial-, social-, or even self- discontent – to get where they are.
This is a powerful rhetorical situation as the broadcasting station, Logo, was founded to appeal to the LGBTQ+ community (Goldmark, 504), wherein the United States they paved progress through sometimes literal blood, sweat, and tears. Therefore, whether drag performers themselves or not, the Logo audience, can find parallels with RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants, fostering the notion that people are incomplete without their past and the lessons learned there shape their future selves.
Promotions for the sixth installment of RPDR featured a cat-suit clad RuPaul sharing a pink spotlight with a black panther – a nod to the lyric “Panther on the runway” featured in her song Glamazon. This particular season broadcasted from February 24 – May 19, 2014, saw fourteen drag queen glamazons traversing the jungle of self-acceptance arcs and, according to ranker.com, manifested the most popular winner to date ("The Best Contestants on RuPaul's
Drag Race"). Each episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race is typically constructed in three phases: a mini challenge, main challenge, and runway presentation based on a particular category e.g. black and white, animal kingdom, Tony Award eleganza, etc. It’s on the main stage of the runway where each contestants’ main challenge performance and execution of their runway presentation is scrutinized by the panel of judges. In Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-
Language Approach, Killingsworth points out that “appeals to the body are contextually determined and are rarely as simple as they seem but usually work in combination with other appeals to suggest complex understandings of values” (69). RuPaul’s Drag Race, in this case, requests each queen to adapt their looks and sense of self within the context of the episode’s parameters.
Season six premiered with a two-episode arc, “RuPaul’s Big Opening” and “RuPaul’s
Big Opening Part 2”. The queen’s first main challenge is to construct an original garment using materials inspired by television shows or party supplies. Contestant Darienne Lake was assigned materials based on a St. Patrick’s Day party. In RuPaul’s work room sidebar with Darienne, she advised: “The challenge isn’t to do Leprechaun, but it’s to interpret the box to Darienne Lake’s style.” The aim then is for the queens to turn the external material into representations of their internal selves – a reflection on what most people do on a day-to-day basis as they represent their own personas through clothing, makeup, and hairstyle.
In the episode, “The Rusical,” where the queens put on a Broadway-style show, contestant April Carrion is tasked with the role of a “big queen.” As April has a thinner build, she adds more padding to her body in an attempt to achieve the character. After a lackluster performance, however, regular judge Michelle Visage critiques April, stating that embodying a “big girl” is not just about how they look, but rather it’s an extension of a big, powerful personality. In Jessica Strübel-Scheiner’s article “Gender Performativity and Self-Perception:
Drag as Masquerade” she states:
It is also possible that they have used drag performance as a replacement for gym activity and bulking up to alleviate body esteem and self esteem issues within the scrutinizing gay community. Drag, for these individuals, has become an alternative for receiving the attention they seek from their gay cohorts. Drag performance is, in a sense, therapeutic when it comes to body esteem (18). This supports Visage’s point, which the essence of drag, whether the performer is slight or stout of build, is an exercise of proudly expressing individuality. And as Visage critiques Australian- born contestant Courtney Act for “relying on the body” – as Courtney frequently hits the runway in relatively skimpy outfits – her judging modus operandi comes full circle in enforcing the blend of personality in conjunction with the external representation of drag. The two should work in tandem to heighten self-identity.
While the LGBTQ+ community is RPDR’s target audience by way of association with
Logo TV, the show has accumulated a fan base of those who identify as heterosexual, especially heterosexual women. That is not to say the show has received negative critiques from supposed feminists comparing drag to blackface. “It is painful and difficult to work through the encrusted stereotypes and assumptions we carry with us to understand” gender, especially in a society whose thick skin has been thinned by a zeal for political correctness (Killingsworth, 97). On the contrary, RuPaul and the drag queens of Drag Race, uphold the power of femininity and break down the offensive stereotypes surrounding gender. Drag queens and their art mock hyperfeminity, ridiculing female gender stereotypes, “vehemently deny[ing] the misogynistic implications, claiming it is actually a satire of prescribed gender roles created by heterosexual men” (Strübel-Scheiner, 13). RuPaul has faced the opposition of the gender hierarchy, recounting a story between her and Milton Berle at a televised award show. While Berle has been known for drag that makes fun of and puts down women, RuPaul’s drag is centered on love, opening the art of drag to everyone.
She goes on to say:
Meanwhile, he [Berle] had his hands all over me—honking my foam rubber breasts, grabbing my crotch, putting his hands all over my bottom—and I was pushing them off, thinking, “What is this?” If I had been Cindy Crawford there would have been lawsuits flying all over the place within five minutes and the show would not have gone on (Schewe, 676). Since RuPaul draws from her experiences to operate Drag Race, she does so in the spirit of breaking down gendered barriers. Not every queen on Drag Race represents one subset of drag, as such the variety of men on the show range widely on the scale of “feminine” and “masculine.”
Daems observes:
Like RuPaul in the first two segments, the contestants are seen primarily in male clothing or in various stages of drag transition preparing for the challenges. This very explicitly presents their transformations from male to queen for viewers and can be seen as highlighting the way gender works in our culture. But it can also highlight the way in which those very gender constructs can be subverted (4). It’s important to distinguish that the queens on the show are not confused about their genders, or with transgendered and transsexual individuals. At one point, Courtney Act recounts stories of sexual encounters she has with men while in drag. “Being in drag gives me access to a certain kind of man.” She continues “When a straight man meets a woman who thinks like a man, it’s a match made in heaven. In a two party preferred system of gay and straight these men identify as straight, but that’s not the way the world works. Maybe if we weren’t so hell bent on categorizing them as gay, which scares the shit out of them, everybody would get laid more.”
Here, Drag Race addresses the fluidity of gender and sexuality that is not as accessible to normativity in society. The art of drag – and its appeals to body and gender – draws striking parallels to the sophist approach to rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition offers the definition: “The word sophist is derived from the adjective Sophos, meaning ‘wise’, and might be translated ‘expert’” where “Sophistry uses satire to bring about change” and “Vigorous presentation of paradoxes and controversial moral views by sophists illustrated the potential of rhetoric for social change” (Kennedy, 29, 30, 37). Indeed, the paradox of men performing identity through drag creates satire, and in a political climate pushing against LGBTQ+ progress, it certainly calls attention to the importance of continued social change. Sophists who enticed followers who paid for instruction mirrors not only drag queens performing for audience tips to share their artistry, but is further echoed in Drag Race’s heavily product branded reality television platform: “These programs thus sell not only specific products but also formulaic self- help narratives for participants and, by extension, viewers” (Goldmark, 504).
Drag performance inherently questions the gender “truths” or normative within society by heightening the male frame of both body and mind with the power and influence of feminine apparel. Susan Jarratt claims in her book, Rereading The Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, which sophists “believed and taught that notions of ‘truth’ had to be adjusted to fit the ways of a particular audience in a certain time and with a certain set of beliefs and laws. Thus they advanced concepts of kairos (timeliness) and to prepon (fitness)” (xv). Drag relies on the performer living in the moment, conveying a message through costume and performance. On
Drag Race, the contestants’ portrayals of their “truths’’ are framed within the Kairos of their time on the show – their time there, in fact, is impacted by these portrayals, or performances.
Today, drag queens and the rhetoric of drag as it relates to the common representation of one’s self through external adornment finds an important place in breaking through into a mainstream consciousness of acceptance. Using the sophists’ process, drag queens on Drag Race challenge gender hierarchy discourse and the traditions that hold these authorities in place
(Jarratt, xxiv). RuPaul has claimed her sophistry calling through Drag Race as a means to disseminate and exalt the value of personal empowerment as the tool to combat self-loathing that breeds social discontent.
Bolstering the legacy of the social warrior queens of the Stonewall Riots, RuPaul’s Drag
Race sets itself as a platform for nurturing future queens in the battle against gender binary normativity, while simultaneously educating the mainstream public of the survival stories each queen has to impart. As modern sophists encouraging self-expression through the appeals of body and gender, RuPaul, and her Drag Race queens celebrate the fusion of masculine and feminine virtues, proving a life lived free from the shame of self-imposed seriousness is at times the most edified. The promotion of positive self-identity starts within before it can be shared with others, just as RuPaul ends each Drag Race episode by asserting “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” Can I get an amen?
Works Cited
Daems, Jim. The Makeup of RuPaul's Drag Race: Essays on the Queen of Reality Shows. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &,, 2014. Print. Goldmark, Matthew. "National Drag." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.4 (2015): 501-20. Web. Jarratt, Susan Carole Funderburgh. Rereading The Sophists : Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 13 Dec. 2016. Kennedy, George A.. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (2). Chapel Hill, US: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 December 2016.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-language Approach. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print.
Schewe, Elizabeth. "Serious Play: Drag, Transgender, And The Relationship Between Performance And Identity In The Life Writing Of Rupaul And Kate Bornstein." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 32.4 (2009): 670-295. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Dec. 2016. Strübel-Scheiner, Jessica. "Gender Performativity and Self-Perception: Drag as Masquerade." International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1.13 (2011): 12-19. Web. 13 Dec. 16.