Drag celebrity impersonation as queer caricature in The Snatch Game

ABSTRACT

The Snatch Game episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race are hugely popular and highly anticipated. A test of their make-up and acting skills, the game requires competitors to impersonate celebrities and answer outrageous questions in-character. The hyperbolic nature of these impersonations, consistent with the culture and affective resonance of drag and camp, invites us to read them as performed caricatures. Caricature, like camp, can be critical and transgressive. It can also depend on gendered, classed, ableist or racialised stereotypes as part of its implied critique of its subject. This article will consider how Snatch Game caricatures manifest this play of subversion and conservatism in relation to the selection of celebrity subjects and the modes of performance applied to the impersonation of them. This article will analyse the relationship between drag, caricature and celebrity as it plays out in The Snatch Game, by considering how the celebrity impersonation draws on and subverts a celebrity’s persona. If camp can be defined as ‘queer parody’, drag impersonations may be looked at as queer caricature.

KEYWORDS:

• RuPaul’s Drag Race
• celebrity impersonation
• drag
• camp
• caricature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘Mostly’ because (a) some transwomen and non-binary people have competed in the Snatch Game, and (b) some competitors have performed as male celebrities.

2. ‘Grotesque’ is used in this context as a noun, to refer to the art historical category of portrait, sculpture or architectural feature which displays a deliberately gross, ugly or deformed figure springing from the artists’ imagination, not based on a pre-existing subject.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hannah Andrews

Hannah Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at Edge Hill University. Her current research focuses on representations of real people in popular culture, including biographical drama and caricature. Her forthcoming book, Broadcasting Biography, explores the history, form and ethics of biographical representation on television.