‘No one is trash, no one is garbage, no one is cancelled’: the cultural politics of trauma, recovery and rage in RuPaul’s Drag Race

ABSTRACT

Historically, Drag Race has mobilised stories about homophobia, family violence, racism and femmephobia that produce drag as a technology of recovery: a means of rising above trauma, in line with media scholarship on the centrality of personal trauma narratives in reality TV. Queer scholars have argued that this imperative to tell positive stories silences more melancholic, ‘negative’ voices; of the tension between the need to speak of ‘damage’, and a ‘related and contrary desire to affirm queer existence’. Seen as the embodiment of the histrionic, dramatic drag queen villainess and dubbed ‘the whistle-blower of the season’, Season 10 queen The Vixen subverted familiar trauma narratives, engendering an opening up around narratives of trauma, racism and transmisogyny. This paper examines The Vixen’s absence and her re-emergence on social media, reading her viral tweet declaring ‘no-one is cancelled’ as a provocation that unsettles dominant accounts of mental health, survival and trauma. I argue that in speaking up for the ‘trash, garbage and cancelled’ subject, The Vixen speaks to Heather Love’s call for a queer politics that consider injury as something that might be ‘lived with, not necessarily fixed’. In this sense, her flawed star persona resonates with a mad scholarship that constituting a productive mad and queer politics of vulnerability.

KEYWORDS:

• RuPaul’s Drag Race
• black rage
• personal trauma
• queer existence
• celebrity damage

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Paul Byron for the Facebook conversation that inspired this article, and to Tom Brassington for reminding me about the bus stop incident.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked! Season 10, episode 3, Diva Worship. VH1: 14 March.

2. RuPaul’s Drag Race, 2015 Season 7, episode 7, Snatch Game. Logo TV, 13 April.

3. RuPaul’s Drag Race, 2013 Season 5, episode 7, RuPaul Roast. Logo TV, 11 March.

4. Rupaul’s Drag Race, 2013 Season 5, episode 2, Lip Synch Extravaganza Eleganza. Logo TV, February 4.

5. See Puar (2012) for a more detailed critique of the ways in which Dan Savage’s ‘It Gets Better’ project reproduces neoliberal values, and how this might be productively challenged.

6. More recent reality TV productions have foregrounded self-love to an even greater extent than Drag Race, to equally problematic yet moving effect: see, for example, the rebooted Queer Eye, whose ‘fab five’ embodies this version of queer celebrity as self-love guru.

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Debra Ferreday

Debra Ferreday is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at Lancaster University. Her work explores the interconnections of feminist cultural studies, queer theory and digital media theory; she has published widely on issues of representation, embodiment, and mediation. Her forthcoming book, Rethinking Femininity,  looks at fashion, popular culture, performance cultures and digital media to argue examine how cultural anxieties around trauma and vulnerability play out through a culturally pervasive abjection of the feminine.