“You Better Work:” the Commodification of HIV in Rupaul's
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Hunter Hargraves “You Better Work:” The Commodification of HIV in RuPaul’s Drag Race In a 2010 episode of Comedy Central’s South Park (1994), set in San Francisco, these excesses quite in which the residents of South Park combat an literally manifest themselves in the controversy and army of New Jersey emigrants, a town hall meeting media coverage of the season’s principle character, prominently displays a map of the United States Pedro Zamora, who succumbed to HIV-related in which a majority of the nation east of Colorado progressive multifocal leukoencephalitis the day has become subsumed into New Jersey’s borders.1 after the season’s final episode aired. Zamora, Through its intertextual references to programs arguably the first reality TV celebrity, unabashedly such as MTV’s Jersey Shore and Bravo’s The Real used the medium as a platform for educating the Housewives of New Jersey, the South Park episode, in public about the experience of living with HIV. its typical parodic fashion, exaggerates stereotypical Bounded by these themes of excess, celebrity, and Italian-American culture – from gelled hair and stereotype, the unusual confluence between reality grotesquely tanned skin to constant swearing and television and discourses surrounding the HIV/ a short temperament – while constructing it as a AIDS epidemic continued into the competitive threat to the nation’s cultural purity. One cannot gamedoc sub-genre of reality programming in the escape, however, the episode’s underlying message: early 2000s. HIV-positive contestants have since the real contaminant is not New Jersey, but rather appeared on American and European television the excess of reality TV. programs such as Project Runway, Top Design, and The way in which the South Park episode Big Brother Germany. characterizes reality television provides a On Logo’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, Ongina, one of provocative point of entry into how historical the program’s first season contestants, disclosed her discourses of contamination and disease map positive serostatus upon winning the 2009 “MAC/ onto the rhetorics of reality television, and vice Viva Glam Challenge,” in which the aspiring versa. The excess of reality television, typified, “dragtestants” shot short promotional screen for instance, by its capacity for manufacturing tests for MAC makeup’s Viva Glam campaign interpersonal drama (as in the case of Jersey Shore) benefitting the MAC HIV/AIDS Fund.2 Ongina’s or its assembling of “real” people from different disclosure, which was accompanied by tears and geographic, ethnic, and ideological backgrounds support from her fellow contestants and the judging (as in the case of the Real Housewives franchise) panel, allowed her to become a cause célèbre in the appears in one of the earliest examples of the LGBT press; despite her shocking elimination in genre, MTV’s The Real World. In its third season the following episode, her fifteen minutes of fame HARGRAVES extended into many appearances in online and function, to give birth to the new man or the man print publications and media events, including as a without particularities, to reunite the original and “Celebrity Guest” in the 2009 San Francisco Pride humanity by constituting a society of brothers as a Parade and appearances in promotional spots new universality.”3 As an extension of the processes for Drag Race and in the program’s 2010 spinoff, of “becoming” developed in A Thousand Plateaus, RuPaul’s Drag U. this new method of identification appears to hint As a “campy queen” known for her personality at an understanding of external subjectivity as key and glamour, Ongina’s admission can be framed to the citizen; conceiving of an identity alongside as destabilizing historical notions and media his brothers and sisters, the subject moves from the representations of the Person With AIDS (PWA). outside of society to part of its normative core.4 At the same time, however, Ongina’s disclosure on This emphasis on identification as process, as reality television revises how conventional media relation can be found within the rich discourses representations have depicted the PWA through a of AIDS activism, as the epidemic placed blame rationale of commodification. This essay attempts on gay men’s sexual behavior. In demanding that to trouble Drag Race’s staging of HIV and situates gay men resist calls for reduced promiscuity, it in conversation with both its presentation of drag Douglas Crimp disputes the abandonment of and its position within larger structures of reality radical politics for an identification with the television. What does it mean in 2010 to have larger public’s moralistic rebuke of homosexuality, former reality TV contestants as the celebrity “faces” an identification, he argues, that invokes Freud’s of HIV in LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities? definition of melancholia: What implications does Ongina’s disclosure have on the genre of reality television itself and on Identification is, of course, identification its (and television’s overall) potential to educate with an other, which means that identity is specific (and perhaps marginalized) publics? How never identical to itself. This alienation of does Drag Race’s treatment of race inflect how it identity from the self it constructs, which presents drag culture and the drag queen PWA? is a constant replay of a primary psychic And how does the framework of reality television self-alienation, does not mean simply that automatically construct and present the HIV- any proclamation of identity will be only positive subject as simultaneously diseased and partial, that it will be exceeded by other healthy, both castrated and constituted as an object aspects of identity, but rather that identity of sexual desire? is a relation, never simply a positivity.5 Becoming-Queen Like Deleuze, Crimp foregrounds identity as relational, leading a reformulation of identity In an essay on Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, politics as dependent upon a network of political, Gilles Deleuze revises a psychoanalytic theory of and not familial, identifications. Moreover, identification premised on Oedipal relationships, identification speaks to a construction of formulating a broader definition of identification community outside of the dominant public sphere, that hints at a “becoming-community” of group in this case, those infected with HIV. This act citizenship. Imagining a community no longer of identification often requires a transformative governed by the paternal function – following moment to incite political action; upon being Lacan, the institution of law and the subject’s entry diagnosed with HIV, the subject identifies “with into language and the symbolic – Deleuze calls for an other,” such as a larger community of HIV- preserving individual identity as a requirement for positive individuals, and thus becomes politicized departing from normal or “majoritarian” models of through these relations. socialized identity. He writes: “If humanity can be In the “MAC/Viva Glam Challenge,” saved, and the originals reconciled, it will only be Ongina’s disclosure represents this transformation through the dissolution or decomposition of the from the filial to the fraternal, disrupting the paternal function…To liberate man from the father conventional forms of identification present in RACE, SEXUALITY, AND TELEVISION 25 YOU BETTER WORK the mass public and instead, through this disidentification, contribute to the function of a counterpublic sphere.”8 Claiming that psychoanalysis elides ideological prohibitions inherent to society (such as assumptions of and discrimination against subjects of minority ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual orientation), he views subjects as containing the capacity to articulate multiple points of identity simultaneously, without subsuming one into another for the sake of normative assimilation. Disidentification thus “scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message Ongina discloses of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary Drag Race. Prior to her moment of disclosure, machinations and recircuits its workings to account Ongina, like her fellow dragtestants, remains in for, include, and empower minority identities and the shadow of drag icon RuPaul, the program’s identifications.”9 In a chapter on, fittingly, Pedro creator, host, and producer. Whether in full drag or Zamora, disidentification becomes the means to in a chic suit, RuPaul curiously functions as both a performance of queer, Latino, and HIV-positive mother and father on the program, mentoring identity, a performance that transforms Zamora the contestants on how to be a better drag queen into a “televisual activist,” additionally notable for and instituting the “law” of the program as head occurring within the corporate ethos of MTV.10 of the judging panel that decides each episode’s Of course, there are differences between eliminee. Yet in disclosing her HIV status, Ongina Zamora and Ongina, the most obvious being that disassociates herself from this parental diva, who Ongina did not appear on Drag Race in order to although having appeared in numerous HIV and specifically market a hybridized identity.11 But AIDS awareness campaigns has never publicly Muñoz’s theory of disidentification can be used to disclosed her HIV status.6 With her disclosure, explore how Drag Race premises the contemporary Ongina can be a spokesperson for HIV awareness American drag queen as already disidentified campaigns independent of RuPaul; she no longer