Discontents of Being and Becoming Fabulous on RuPaul's Drag U: Queer Criticism in Neoliberal Times

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that RuPaul's Drag U reinforces an apparent postfeminist/neoliberal worldview through a rhetoric of “narcissism as liberation,” which inevitably rearticulates classic tropes of patriarchal domination. In particular, I find that Drag U relies on (and promotes) individualization and competition as primary logics that purport to signal liberation in a neoliberal economy. By the end of each episode, contestants are presumed to embody a corrected gender expression (read: feminine female). Rather than embrace gender-anormative expressions, they seek assimilation into a mythical normative center. Considering its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) audience, Drag U works to integrate drag/trans/queer bodies into an unchanged homonormative and gender-normative mainstream that fails to address the various needs of those queer bodies that do not so easily yield to its demands. In the end, I advocate for a queer coalitional potentiality that resists individualization and competition.

Keywords:

• cissexism
• drag queen
• feminism
• homonormativity
• neoliberalism
• queer theory
• television
• transgender

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the brilliant insight of the anonymous reviewers and acknowledges the care and support that the editor, Joan Faber McAlister, provided throughout the editing process. Also, special thanks to the many friends and colleagues who offered thoughts on the essay and the show, especially Jesus Valles, Miranda Olzman, Duval Bodden, Roger Willis, and Beth Boser.

Notes

See LeMaster and Mapes for a discussion on the differences between transgender as a heuristic device used to critically explore culture and transgender as a self-determined identity, as well as the potential problematics of ascribing (trans)gender identification to subjects that do not identify as such.

Jodi Dean offers a succinct and important articulation of the individual and its role in both liberal and neoliberal governance. I quote Dean at length: “For classic liberals, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the free, rational individual is the very foundation of the state, that which grounds and limits legitimate government. Neoliberals neither anchor their account of the rational chooser in a domain of natural freedom nor make the rational chooser the ground and limit of government. Rather, they see the subject as acting and reacting in accordance with various economic incentives and disincentives. For neoliberals, then, a goal of governance is to ‘construct responsible subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative acts.’ In short, neoliberalism doesn't rely on preexisting conditions. It creates new ones, reformatting social and political life in terms of its ideal of competition within markets” (52). Accordingly, the neoliberal subject is individualized and pitted against other neoliberal subjects (who are also individualized) vying for the same goal: enfranchisement into the mythical normative center. On Drag U, then, competition is not about empowering women as a class so much as it is about empowering three women to embody femininity on their own for their own pursuit toward realizing the mythical normative center.

In a similar show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, gay men give straight men makeovers. The underlying assumption is that gay cisgender men are more proficient at performing “straight,” “cisgender,” and “man” than are the straight men. Like Drag U, the queer subjects of Queer Eye educate and discipline performances of sex, gender, and sexuality to both the contestants and the viewing audience (Westerfelhaus and Lacroix 431; see also Booth).

The three drag queens who have come out as trans include Sonique from season two, Carmen Carerra from season three, and Monica Beverly Hillz from season four. Sonique and Carerra came out after being eliminated from the show, while Hillz came out while still in the competition. All contestants, including RuPaul, continue to refer to these three women as drag queens. All three women continue to perform and identify as drag queens even as they continue their respective transitions. In the third and final season of Drag U, Carerra performed as a drag professor at a time when she was already out as transgender and well into her own transition.

While I restrict my use of homonormative to Lisa Duggan's articulation, it is critical to note that homonormative has an earlier formulation in transgender history and politics. Stryker writes: “Homonormativity, as I first heard and used the term in the early 1990s, was an attempt to articulate the double sense of marginalization and displacement experienced within transgender political and cultural activism… . [W]e also needed to name the ways that homosexuality, as a sexual orientation category based on constructions of gender it shared with the dominant culture, sometimes had more in common with the straight world than it did with us” (145–46). While Stryker's articulation of homonormative is useful for this project, I am admittedly interested in developing Duggan's homonormativity, which implicates recent developments in neoliberal governance. Duggan writes that homonormativity “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). See Stryker for a discussion on the earlier uses of homonormative within transgender circles.