‘Labouring in the image’: celebrity, femininity, and the fully commodified self in the drag of Willam Belli

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the mediagenic drag style of Willam Belli, a contestant from Season 4 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race (2012) and a YouTube performer, as a set of reflections on navigating the ‘demotic turn’ (Graeme Turner) in contemporary celebrity. I propose that Willam’s drag foregrounds the work (labour) and working conditions that lie behind the ‘werq’ on Drag Race. His drag both exemplifies and comments upon the feminised ‘labour of visibility’ (Brooke Erin Duffy’s concept) and practices of self-commodification that the contemporary attention economy demands, particularly of girls, women, and feminine/femme/feminised subjects. Taking up Judith Butler’s (1990) suggestion that drag reveals the processes by which gendered identities are constructed, I argue that Willam’s drag seems to reveal how the ‘labour of visibility’ is currently constructing contemporary femininities. His output constitutes an embedded, enmeshed, and complicit commentary on the construction of a commodified, hypersexualised version of femininity in the contemporary economies of reality television, social media, and digital self-entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• RuPaul’s Drag Race
• drag and labour
• femininity
• visibility
• celebrity
• Willam Belli

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Willam has stated that his pronouns are he/him. By ‘bitch who has to show for a dollar’ he refers to drag queens that perform live in clubs for tips.

2. These anxieties surface more openly in later comments about his career. In his book Suck Less, he describes his acting career in Hollywood as ‘a decade of obscurity’ and declares that he ‘didn’t even make has-been. I’m a never-was’ (p. 52).

3. By ‘ordinary person’ Turner means, not people who are ‘normal’ or ‘average,’ but people who do not have access to the circuits of traditional fame.

4. In Suck Less, see pp. 56–7, ‘Pop Up Quiz! Are You Right for a Reality TV Show?’, which I discuss below. Willam’s complaints about Drag Race have been widely reported online; for one example, see https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/willam-tells-all-drag-race-disqualification/#gs.149my4.

5. ‘Fishy’ is a drag slang term that means extremely feminine and/or passing as cis-female.

6. There is a wealth of online and media reportage and comment on these incidents, particularly the 2017 one. See, for instance: https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/willam-apology-transphobic/; https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2017/9/30/willam-belli-transphobic-shocking-no-one; https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/09/28/rupauls-drag-race-star-willam-belli-shocks-fans-with-transphobic-comments/.

7. ‘Ratchet’ is a slang term with racialised and feminised connotations; it suggests something is despised, tacky, or low.

8. ‘Tea’ or ‘T’ is drag slang for ‘truth,’ often meaning gossip or frank opinion.

9. Here I quote Grindstaff’s book about daytime television talk shows; however she extends the concept of the money shot to reality television in Laura Grindstaff and Susan Murray (2015), ‘Reality Celebrity: Branded Affect and the Emotion Economy,’ Public Culture, 27(1), pp.109–135.

10. Willam was (according to him) excluded from the official Drag Race tour. Thereafter he developed a solo performance that showed after the Drag Race show at venues that the Drag Race tour visited. He named his tour ‘Shafterparty.’

11. Strikingly, Girls Gone Wild also straddles the boundary between reality television and pornography. Mayer has stated that it is ‘a video series that its observers call “soft-core pornography” and its producers call “reality television”’ (2005 p. 303), suggesting the emergence of a ‘reality pornography/documentary industry’ (2005 p. 310). Seen in this context, the proximity of Willam’s drag to pornography also suggests an implicit commentary on reality television.

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Rachel O’Connell

Rachel O’Connell teaches at the University of Sussex, where she convenes the MA in Sexual Dissidence, an MA programme in queer studies, and co-directs the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, a queer studies research hub. She has published research on late nineteenth century British literature in relation to middlebrow culture, prose genres, ethics, sexuality, and disability in journals including ELH and Women’s Writing, and in the essay collection Sex and Disability (ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow). Her current interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary queer femininities.