Syracuse University SURFACE Theses - ALL May 2019 CATEGORY IS: RELIGIOUS “REALNESS” A Consideration of Disparate Subjectivity via “RuPauline Drag” and the House of LaBeija Joss Rae Willsbrough Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/thesis Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Willsbrough, Joss Rae, "CATEGORY IS: RELIGIOUS “REALNESS” A Consideration of Disparate Subjectivity via “RuPauline Drag” and the House of LaBeija" (2019). Theses - ALL. 330. https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/330 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ABSTRACT The project considers the disparity between two case studies of “drag:” 1) “RuPauline drag” (RuPaul’s Drag Race, RuPaul, and affiliated properties), and 2) the House of LaBeija as a microcosm of ballroom drag, an international phenomenon comprised predominantly by queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) competing in self-hosted “balls.” These “cases” are assessed as ideal texts, that is, ideal types (heuristic and reductive) which are interpreted as texts (via hermeneutical methodology) in hopes of comparing the cases for the subjectivities they foster and the orientations they promulgate. This work begins with a comparison of the “cases” via the settings in which they occur, contrasting their relationship to and deployment of race, gender, class, and sex(uality), while the latter half examines their practices and professed values, via performance, ritual, kinship, and fantasy, for the orientations they create and sustain. Taken together, the comparison of these “cases” aims to resist the flat, cisgender-heterosexual-normative reading of “drag” as a homogenous practice and insists that the demarcation of certain subjects as “religious” further marginalizes and invalidates people and communities for whom drag holds an ultimate importance.