RuPaul’s Drag Race: A study in the commodification of white ruling-class femininity and the etiolation of drag
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the spectacularized commodification of the queer body that takes place in RuPaul’s Drag Race. In appropriating the political history of drag culture as both social commentary and activism, RuPaul’s Drag Race silences the resistance to hegemonic gender binaries that is characteristic of the origins of radical drag. Drag Race commodifies the body through performances of drag that simultaneously attempt to subvert as they reify and fetishize hegemonic expressions of white, ruling-class femininity. This brings into stark relief the continuing relevance of both bell hooks and Judith Butler’s early theoretical interventions into the world of drag. Our examination of RuPaul’s Drag Race will draw on these insights by putting them into conversation with Catherine Rottenberg and Matt Sparke’s work on the embodiment of neo-liberal market ideology in a way that speaks to Ali MacLaurin and Aoife Monks’ conceptualization of the everyday through what Marcel Mauss refers to as techniques of the body. It is our contention that through the manipulation of physiology, the contestants in RuPaul’s Drag Race render corporeality a form of costuming that simultaneously etiolates drag and commodifies the body. Instead of subverting gender norms, the show’s capacity to create and disseminate legitimate and illegitimate modes of embodiment both reinforces and continues to shape already existing social hierarchies at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".