But is it fashion?: Fat femininities exceeding the boundaries of fashion on RuPaul’s Drag Race
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Queer spaces are often exclusionary of fat bodies, including those who embody femininity in their gender presentation. Similarly, the fashion industry has historically excluded fat femmes which has been challenged in recent years through the “body positivity” movement to varying degrees of success. The exclusion of fat bodies from queer spaces and the fashion industry can be exemplified by examining the trope of the “fashion queen” on the television show, RuPaul’s Drag Race and within its fandom. As the show has gained popularity, an increased focus has been placed on the runway presentations on the show. This has led to an archetype for contestants on the show to be a “fashion queen”, similar to other archetypes, such as the “pageant queen” and the “comedy queen”. However, unlike these other categories, the contestants who fit the fashion queen archetype are almost exclusively thin and represent normative ideals of femininity. Fat drag queens who present unique or intricate looks on the runway are often labelled “camp” in a way that places them outside the boundaries of fashion. While the show has often embraced camp aesthetics, this demarcation of fat queens as camp has taken on a pejorative nature within the fan community surrounding the show. In this paper, I will examine the discourse of the “fashion queen” and highlight the limitations, especially in the realm of fashion and runways, that are put on fat and plus-size drag queens on the show. These limitations highlight how the show limits the excessive potential of queer performers by forcing them to fit into narrow definitions of beauty and glamour. I will also examine how the demarcation of these queens as “camp” highlights how the show has altered queer aesthetics. These limitations are reflective of the negative treatment that fat bodies are given within the fashion industry and the queer community at large. I will also examine how further intersectional identities, such as race and disability, further construct these bodies as exceeding the acceptable boundaries of fashion.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".