Serving fishy realness: representations of gender equity on <i>RuPaul’s Drag Race</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical theorists argue that a dialectical materialism exists between ideology and culture and the material conditions of society. The same can be said for the production of sexuality and gender on television. Representations of drag queens in mainstream media have appeared in Hollywood films such as Victor/Victoria, Paris is Burning and The Birdcage. This paper argues that the complexity and holistic representation of drag queens in television media is often as complicated as the lived realities of drag queens themselves. By analysing a popular reality television show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, this paper will employ a rubric based on three stages to explore how gender is represented to the public. Each stage progresses from mocking drag queens and perpetuating negative stereotypes about genderqueer individuals, to more ‘normalizing’ depictions of said participants while still reinforcing heteronormative stereotypes, to ultimately portraying drag queens as holistic people on equal footing with their heterosexual counterparts. Implications and recommendations for further research are also presented at the conclusion of this paper.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".