‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race

ABSTRACT

Many scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja’s act as the ‘Native,’ after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews’s elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations.

KEYWORDS:

• Drag
• creativity
• settler colonialism
• indigeneity
• racial complicities
• queer of colour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nishant Upadhyay is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Notes

1. I want to acknowledge the tremendous support given by Dia Da Costa and Alex Da Costa, co-editors of this special issue and co-organizers of Reimagining Creative Economy (RCE). Thanks also to Fraser Macpherson, Meredith Heller, Kyle T. Mays, Rita K. Dhamoon, and Kareem Khubchandani for their engaging and thoughtful comments on this project. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from the RCE workshop participants, and the audiences at the American Studies Association Chicago panel and the Literary & Textual Analysis Colloquium talk at Northern Arizona University. Lastly, thanks also to Timothy Pearson for meticulous and critical copyediting.

2. Logo TV was founded in 2005 to cater specifically to ‘a social, savvy audience of gay trendsetters …  [and] a straight audience that wants to be ahead of the curve’ (Goldmark 2015, p. 504). Eve Ng (2013, p. 258) critiques it for re-marginalizing already marginalized queer subjects, and ‘comprising a homonormativity predicated on discourses of consumerism, progress, and integration.’

3. This highly-rated reality television show started its eleventh season in 2019 on VH1, and its spinoff RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars just finished the fourth season in 2019.

4. Sarah Hankins (2015, pp. 447–48) defines genderfuck as ‘arguably the most complex and multisignifying mode of gender performance, eschews the male/female binary itself, incorporating extremely (de) (re) formed representations of masculinity and femininity alongside multigendered, nongendered, or even nonhuman signs, without privileging any one category of being.’

5. Throughout the paper, I use the terms Indigenous and Native interchangeably. In doing so I am not seeking to create universal and homogenous Indigenous subjects. Indigeneity is not an essential or stagnant marker of identity, rather as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma) and Michael Rothberg (2011, p. 3) argue: ‘“indigeneity” holds the promise of rearticulating and reframing questions of place, space, movement and belonging.’ Indigeneity is, thus, space-time specific, dynamic, and politically enabled and enabling.

6. I use feminine pronouns for all contestants and for RuPaul, as they refer to each other using feminine pronouns on the show.

7. Complicities do not erase violences faced by queer and trans peoples of colour due to intersections of colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Rather, I theorize complicities to make visible the overlapping and simultaneous processes of violence-making and privilege-making.

8. I understand Asianness here not as a universal marker as ‘Asian’ identity is not uniform or homogenous. Rather, through Asianness I demonstrate how racial and colonial structures in the US function through differing taxonomies where Asian bodies can partake in settler colonial, antiblack, and white supremacist processes varyingly. Further, Islamophobia, caste (in the context of South Asians), ‘border imperialism’ (Walia 2013), neoliberalism, and imperial wars affect different Asian communities differently. Raja’s Indonesian background ruptures the dominance of East Asian and South Asian narratives of Asianness. However, Raja can still uphold hegemonic constructs of Asian identity, and as I demonstrate in this paper, be complicit in processes of settler colonialism.

9. Raja described the runway look as: ‘The look I have chosen is quite global. Just kind of National Geographic. Apocalypto. Amazon gal’ (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2011c). In an interview on Entertainment Weekly, Raja elaborated:

I think my favourite look was probably my Amazonian avatar or whatever that tribal look was. I remember when we were asked to wear our own drag and what looked like us, I toyed with a few different costumes that I wanted to wear and that one was the one that I chose. Of course, I kind of questioned myself a little bit—I was like, Wow, this might be a little bit too scary for everyone—but I put it on and it just made so much sense. This is me, this is what I look like, and it was definitely a great representation of who I am as a drag queen. I love the idea of things that are global’ (Raja quoted in Stransky 2011).

Praising the outfit, the judges made the following remarks: ‘Gurl, the natives are so restless’ (RuPaul), and ‘Two tribes for a war’ (Santino Rice) (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2011c). In fact, Rice responded by clicking his tongue, most likely mocking Xhosa language which is spoken in parts of South Africa and Zimbabwe and has click consonants. In a later scene, Raja imitating Rice, responds: ‘Or as they say in the language of my people [clicks tongue].’ Both these imitations by Rice and Raja are seen as comic acts and met with laughter.

10. Elsewhere, she has been critiqued for appropriating Hindu deity looks by painting herself in blue. I should further note that her name is a pan South and South East Asian term meaning ‘king’.

11. Raja has publically also claimed to be two-spirit on Facebook (Raja 2013, 2014). I discuss this claim later in the paper.

12. In a Facebook post on May 24, 2015, she wrote the following about these critiques:

I need to say something. Those who accuse me of ‘cultural appropriation’ are those who have never left their front lawns, mostly in their small American towns. That is, assuming you have a lawn, or a life. I travel, a lot more than you. No seriously, I travel a lot more than most. I come from a mixed background of European and Asian, and I grew up in the hood. Bite me, get a passport, and gag on my sick ass style. Don’t be mad at the person who celebrates cultures that he has experienced and loves first hand. It’s always the ones who sit around watching it thru a screen that have the biggest, worthless opinions. K bye!! (Raja 2015)

13. It should be noted that it is with the colonization of Indigenous lands that US exerts its military imperialism elsewhere (Byrd).

14. RuPaul, who is Black, dressed as a cowboy for this part of the show.

15. Sarah Tucker Jenkins (2013) notes that Stacy’s fatness played another major role in how RuPaul and the contestants perceive Stacy as a not-competent enough drag queen. Jenkins writes: ‘Stacey’s fellow contestants cannot look past her size and rural background long enough to notice that she is a funny, clever entertainer’ (p. 68). In fact, according to Jenkins body-size is a significant source of contention between plus-sized Stacy and thin-bodied Raja, with the latter openly engaging in fat-phobic discourses. Jenkins highlights a joke that Raja made about Stacy: ‘carry her own weight, no pun intended’. (p. 96)

16. In Season 9 of the Drag Race, white drag queen Alexis Michelle walked the runaway in an outfit which was also blatantly an appropriation of Native aesthetics. RuPaul did not like the outfit, not because of appropriation rather on the basis of the look. RuPaul critiqued the look: ‘Your Native American couture …  left the judges with reservations’ (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2017).

17. Muñoz (p. 99) writes further on RuPaul and complexities of queer (corporate) visibilization, ‘Indeed, this ‘boom’ in drag helps one understand that a liberal-pluralist mode of political strategizing only eventuates a certain absorption and nothing like a productive engagement with difference. Thus, although RuPaul, for example, hosts a talk show on VH-1, one only need to click the remote control and hear about the defenses of marriage legislation that ‘protect’ the family by outlawing gay marriage. Indeed, the erosion of gay civil rights is simultaneous with the advent of higher degrees of queer visibility in the mainstream media.’

18. Indigenous artist Kent Monkman and his drag alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle is a testament to those radical drag practices which assert Indigenous sovereignty and challenge hegemonic forms violences.

19. Neoliberalism is a key logic shaping creative practices. I join other contributors to this special issue in mapping the intersections of creativity, neoliberalism, and multiple colonialisms by focusing on queer aesthetics in these formations.

20. ‘Realness,’ José Muñoz (1999, p. 211) theorizes, is ‘mimetic of a certain high-feminine style in standard realist terms.’

21. I note the specific attention to Puerto Rico to demonstrate the multiple colonial processes at play here and the subsequent erasure of indigeneity in the US as well as in Puerto Rico.

22. In her congratulatory commentary, RuPaul said: ‘Manila, you perpetuated stereotypes, condragulations you are the winner of this challenge’ (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2011c). ‘Condragulations’ is a neologism used by RuPaul.

23. For more on Asian complicities in settler colonialism and Asian settler colonialism, see Fujikane 2008, Saranillio 2010, 2013, Byrd 2011, Jafri 2013, Dhamoon 2015, Day 2016, Patel 2016, Upadhyay 2016.

24. Social class is a key aspect of binary, where Stacy lacks the economic means and resources to be ‘cosmopolitan’ as compared to Raja. Furthermore, high levels of poverty in the Lumbee community is a direct result of settler colonial processes, and the fact that Lumbee Indians are not federally recognized.