Emotion, Femininity and Everyday Experience
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Emotion, Femininity and Everyday Experience Straight Female Audience’s Perception of RuPaul’s Drag Race Student name: Yoshino Akizuki Student number: 509330 Supervisor: Balázs Boross Master Arts, Culture and Society Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication Erasmus University Rotterdam Master Thesis June 14, 2019 ABSTRACT An American reality TV program RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which drag queens compete with each other to be “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” has earned tremendous hit since it was first broadcast in 2009. Although Drag Race started as a niche program featuring drag queens and targeted only at the LGBTQ community, it is becoming a world-wide phenomenon in mainstream popular culture. Especially, straight female audiences have become a large percentage of the audience. However, why are straight women, who have not necessarily had a connection with drag culture, enthusiastic about Drag Race? Previous research on Drag Race are mainly textual analysis addressing particular issues such as race and ethnicity, social class, body shape and femininity (Darnell and Tabatabai, 2017; Edgar, 2011; Goldmark, 2015; LeMaster, 2015; Strings & Bui, 2014; Vesey, 2017). However, they lack the perspective of actual audience. And therefore, they do not explain the popularity among straight female audience. Since the audience of Drag Race has become increasingly diverse, different audiences interpret the contents differently. As Alasuutari (1999) explains using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, intended message from producers is not always received “correctly” by audiences. Therefore, it is significant to take into account the perspective of the audience. Furthermore, as Bird (2003) suggests audiences critically and actively interpret the message and put them in the context of everyday experience, we should closely examine the process of meaning-making. Thus, this research aims at examining straight female audience’s perception of Drag Race. To achieve this, I conducted the interviews with straight female audiences. As a result, it is indicated that the straight female audiences show emotional intimacy with drag queens. Also, femininity performed by drag queens is interpreted as empowering whereas audiences consider drag queen’s behavior stereotypically feminine. Furthermore, audiences reflect their own everyday experience, especially insecurity and pressure caused by confronting with the social norm of femininity. As a conclusion, I suggest audience’s active engagement in Drag Race could be a chance to reinterpret and represent gender, sexuality and femininity. KEYWORDS: RuPaul’s Drag Race, female audience, emotion, femininity, everyday experience Table of Contents Abstract and keywords 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 2. Literature review ............................................................................................................ 6 2.1. Arguments around Drag Race ................................................................................. 6 2.1.1. Problems with the representation of drag in Drag Race .................................... 6 2.1.2. The audience of Drag Race .............................................................................. 9 2.2. Reality television, representation of LGBTQ individuals and the female audience . 11 2.3. The process of meaning-making of the media in everyday life ............................... 14 3. Research question ....................................................................................................... 18 4. Methodology ................................................................................................................ 22 5. Findings ....................................................................................................................... 27 5.1 Engagement in different transformations of drag queens ........................................ 27 5.1.1. Transformation from private self to performative self ...................................... 27 5.1.2. Emotional transformation ................................................................................ 30 5.2. Gender performance and femininity ....................................................................... 34 5.2.1. Visual expression of femininity ........................................................................ 34 5.2.2. Behavioral expression of femininity ................................................................. 37 5.3. Reflection of/in everyday experience ..................................................................... 40 5.3.1. Sense of ritual through the use of language .................................................... 40 5.3.2. Confidence and sense of insecurity ................................................................ 42 6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 46 6.1. Emotion and its “serious” meaning ........................................................................ 46 6.2. Alternative representation/interpretation of femininity ............................................ 47 6.3. Drag Race and everyday experience ..................................................................... 49 6.4. Limitation and suggestions for future research ...................................................... 51 Reference ........................................................................................................................ 53 Appendix 1: Interview guide ............................................................................................. 57 Appendix 2: Interview transcripts ..................................................................................... 59 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank my supervisor Balázs Boross for the generous support through the learning process of this master thesis. Without your support, this thesis would not have existed. Furthermore, I would like to thank the participants in the interviews for sharing precious time and insightful opinions. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my family and friends for giving me unfailing support and continuous encouragement from Japan. This journey would not have been possible without you. Thank you. 1. Introduction When the electro music starts, a beautiful woman with flawless make-up, glamorous body and a gorgeous sequin gown appears on the stage. She walks down the runway in the spotlight like a supermodel. When she stops at the head of the runway, she welcomes the judges to her own TV program while making witty jokes. Then she announces the theme of the runway presentation in which the contestants will be competing and says “Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman win!” In this short moment, she brings breathtaking spectacle to the runway with her beauty, but she is not a woman. She is a man in drag named RuPaul, the most successful drag queen currently in American show business. She is the host of the reality TV program RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which drag queens compete with each other to be “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” In the program, contestants are judged on their ability to successfully complete various tasks or challenges. These include having to make outfits from scratch, act in a sitcom or telenovela, dance in a musical number with lip-sync, or do stand-up comedy in front of a live audience. And they always have to walk down the runway and show their charisma to be a star. The scene described above is the opening of the runway presentation. Each drag queen struts down the runway full of confidence with a flamboyant outfit, make-up, and a skillfully-padded curvy body while a voice-over narrates “I look stunning” or “I’m feeling sexy.” The audience sees drag queens presenting beautiful, powerful and playful figures of women in extremely exaggerated but unique ways. RuPaul’s Drag Race (hereafter Drag Race) has become a tremendous hit since it was first broadcast in 2009. For its first eight seasons, Drag Race was aired on Logo TV, which is an American cable outlet originally aiming at the niche market of LGBTQ audiences. However, the program is now being broadcast on VH1, which is one of Logo’s sister cable outlets under Viacom, Inc., and targets broader audiences (Brennan and Gudelunas, 2017). In fact, Drag Race has gained a lot of audiences all over the world. For example, the season 10 premiere attracted one million viewers (Jordan, 2018), but since Drag Race is available on Netflix and there are other unofficial ways to watch the program on the Internet, there should be much more viewers in reality. Although Drag Race started as a niche and low- 1 budget program featuring drag queens and targeted only at the underrepresented LGBTQ community, it is becoming a world-wide phenomenon in mainstream popular culture as well. This shift is prominent, with some online articles stating that Drag Race is already in the mainstream (Rogers, 2014; Sasson, 2017), but this brings us the question of what has brought the program to the mainstream. This transition could be explained by the fact that straight female audiences have become a large percentage of the audience of the program. There are online articles suggesting that the majority of Drag Race fandom consists of straight female audiences (Crawshaw, 2017; Frank, 2018). Also, according to BBC News, more than 40,000 people attended Drag Con, the fan events held