MOTHER OF THE HOUSE OF NO SHAME: THE QUEER ECONOMY OF RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE BY TED FAUST DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications & Media in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor James Hay, Chair Professor CL Cole Associate Professor Richard T. Rodriguez, UC Riverside Assistant Professor Amanda Ciafone i ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I consider the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race and the vast web of digital and broadcast media productions it has spawned, as a means to explore the changing cultural, technological, and economic conditions that have allowed for the emergence of a widespread queer media economy in which it is currently positioned as a central touchstone and engine of production and productivity. I seek to understand the history and evolution of the changing economics and production practices of the reality television genre that led to the emergence of (and have been deployed, tweaked, and recirculated by) the semi-satirical Drag Race; to better understand its position, as a “broadcast” cable television show, in a wider network of “new” and “spreadable” social media enterprises flowing into and out of it; to analyze the artistic, aesthetic, ethical and ascetic technologies of the self practiced by the contestants on the show, alongside a genealogical account of their origins in queer spaces and subcultures; and to explore the show’s position in a wider television landscape, asking how it is related to other programs of the current conjuncture, its technologization and commodification of a queer mode of belonging, and its relationships to virtual and material queer spaces as a globalized cultural technology. In this project, I hope to explicate a governmentality by which we learn to govern ourselves as sexual and gendered subjects, and which circuitously feeds into and off of the culture industries and post-industrial “creative” economic production more generally. By thinking through and theorizing a political economy of drag through its interconnections with the popular media that circulates particular variations of it, I am seeking to explore the ways that the technologies of the self - the means by which we learn to fashion and govern ourselves - are an essential part of a genealogy of a mode of production that defines the cultural, political, economic, and personal practices that define our current conjuncture. ii To My Queen & Feline Familiar, Geena iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am endlessly grateful to my advisor and committee chair, James Hay, who has patiently supported and encouraged me throughout my lengthy tenure as a graduate student in the ICR. I would not have been able to see my way to the end of this program, or to make my way through this current project, without his wisdom and guidance and good humor. I must thank CL Cole for giving me the opportunity to teach for MACS and having faith in my abilities as a lecturer and leader of my fellow TAs; without this support, I would never have been able to complete my studies, or come to believe in myself as a scholar and teacher. Thank you to Amanda Ciafone for being the best boss I’ve ever had, and teaching me so much about being a teacher. Our semesters working together were some of the best experiences I had in graduate school, owed to her keen intellect and generosity of spirit. My gratitude to Ricky Rodriguez for keeping my spirits up and introducing me to life- and mind-sustaining literature; it is so rare to meet people in academia who are as kind and human and funny as they are ingenious thinkers and great writers, and I am so grateful for having the opportunity to learn from and be encouraged by Ricky. I cannot express the depth of my gratitude for the friends who have supported me through this long and difficult journey; Jenna Frye, Casey Anderson, Erik Lubben, Dan Tye, Megan McSwain, and Anirban Mukhopadhyay have especially provided so much love and patience and support and faith in me when I struggled to sustain myself, and for that I will be forever grateful. Thank you to my loving parents and grandparents, to my siblings and their broods, for their love and support and patience. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE: AN ICON GETS IN (GENDER) TROUBLE……………………………….. 1 CHAPTER 1: KEYWORDS……………………………………………………………… 8 CHAPTER 2: THE HISTORY OF REALITY TV AS A MODE OF PRODUCTION….. 52 CHAPTER 3: THE AUTHORIZED RUPAUL: CELEBRITY SELF-WRITING & THE BRANDED SELF………………………………………………………………………… 95 CHAPTER 4: THE NEVERENDING GIG: AFFECTIVE DRAG LABOR IN THE DRAG RACE UNIVERSE ……………………………………………………………… 143 CHAPTER 5: MOTHERS, SISTERS, & LEGENDARY CHILDREN: TELEVISION AS SITE OF QUEER KINSHIP, COMMUNITY, & HISTORICAL ARCHIVE………. 188 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………241 v PREFACE: AN ICON GETS IN (GENDER) TROUBLE In early March of 2018, the British newspaper The Guardian published a feature profile and interview with RuPaul, meant to chronicle the TV host and pop culture figure’s long career and current mainstream success on the eve of the debut of the tenth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show’s previous season had achieved series-high ratings after migrating to VH1 from the gay-niche cable outlier channel (and fellow Viacom property) Logo, a move that signalled the series’ growing popularity and profile in mainstream popular culture, and RuPaul had won an Emmy for “Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program” for the two consecutive previous years. In the feature article and interview, “RuPaul: ‘Drag is a big f-you to male-dominated culture,’” Decca Aitkenhead presents RuPaul as “a radical from the day he was born,” who speaks in “deeply heartfelt but somewhat opaque rhetorical flourishes.” When Aitkenhead asks if Drag Race has a political message, Ru says that the show “has a position on identity, which is really the most political you can get,” offering “a big f-you” to the notion of stable identities and asking us not to “take any of this shit seriously.” Aitkenhead insists that it “can be tricky” to pin down “precisely what all of this means,” speculating that “he doesn’t want to offend anyone by explicitly acknowledging the contradiction between his playfully elastic sensibility and the militant earnestness of the transgender movement” - casually insinuating that a single “transgender movement” exists, and that it can be characterized as both militant and earnest. RuPaul responds to her assertion by “carefully” agreeing, saying that “that’s always been the dichotomy of the trans movement versus the drag movement, you know,” summoning an easy split and neat division between “trans” and “drag” and placing them both within the boundaries of singular “movements.” When asked if he would 1 allow “biological women” - cisgender women, or those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth - who perform as drag queens to compete on Drag Race, Ru argues that “drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture,” claiming that men performing in drag is “really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.” Pressed to further explain, then, how “a transgender woman [could] be a drag queen” - given that a number of contestants on Drag Race have identified as trans women - RuPaul begins to muse about some imagined transitional spectrum of bodily presentation, noting that Drag Race contestant Peppermint “didn’t get breast implants until after she left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really transitioned.” When asked if he would invite a contestant who had “really transitioned,” he says that he would “probably not,” because “you can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body [...] it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” Aitkenhead characterizes this response as thoughtful, saying that “there’s something very touching about RuPaul’s concern to stay abreast of subcultural developments and find a way to embrace even those he finds confronting,” implying that discourses about trans women who perform drag is a new “development” within some sort of queer “subculture” and that RuPaul was cautiously and patiently attempting to understand them. Almost immediately after the article was published, though, a multitude of queer voices - many belonging to former Drag Race contestants - rose up on Twitter to decry Ru’s comments as ignorant, transphobic, dangerous, and hurtful. Within a day or two, opinion articles and think pieces were published across a wide range of media outlets. A Vox headline offered to explain “How RuPaul’s comments on trans women led to a Drag Race revolt,” while Buzzfeed argued 2 that “RuPaul’s Version Of LGBT History Erases Decades Of Trans Drag Queens.” A Pride.com article rounded up former Drag Race contestants’ tweets for an article titled “Gia Gunn, Sasha Velour, Willam & More Drag RuPaul for Transphobic Comments” - using “drag” in a now- common verb form meaning to expose somebody’s ignorance or uncouth behavior - while an article published by them. presented original interviews with drag performers under the headline “These Trans and Cis Female Drag Queens Have Some WORDS for RuPaul.” Mainstream entertainment publications Entertainment Weekly and Billboard, which have offered regular coverage about Drag Race for the past few years, published news stories about the backlash to RuPaul’s comments, and the subsequent apologies he made via Twitter. The 2018 Guardian interview provides a snapshot, illustrating the ascendance of RuPaul’s Drag Race to a position of broad cultural prominence and its central position in queer popular culture at a very particular conjunction, in which trans* visibility and self-determination and “queer” identities and discourses have moved into mainstream political, cultural, and economic consideration.