Drag on Pointe: Dancer, Television Sensation, and Drag Superstar Brooke Lynn Hytes Is Queering Ballet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before her star-making turn on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Canadian drag artist Brooke Lynn Hytes an was accomplished ballet dancer. The performer, born Brock Hayhoe, trained at Canada’s National Ballet School and danced professionally with both the Cape Town City Ballet and the esteemed drag dance troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. This article explores how Hytes has transported ballet’s deep repertoire of feminine signifiers onto drag stages, including Drag Race and the drag pageant Miss Continental. In doing so, Hytes has furthered the hallmark of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—queering ballet. In particular, Hytes has queered the practice of pointe work, a technique traditionally reserved for woman ballet dancers that functions as one of ballet’s most potent feminine signifiers. By incorporating pointe work into her drag dance, Hytes has revealed the practice to be a fiction of femininity, not unlike the drag queen’s make-up and wig. This article additionally charts Hytes’s pre- Drag Race career, her success since appearing on the show, and her contribution to drag culture in Canada. In a Q&A with Canadian Theatre Review accompanying the piece, Hytes speaks about fusing drag and ballet, her early experiences in the Toronto drag scene, and her hopes for the forthcoming Canadian edition of Drag Race, Canada’s Drag Race.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".