Drag Queens in Stars and Stripes

The prerequisite for RuPaul's form of queerness is nationalism. As many queer theorists from Judith Butler to Jack Halberstam to Jasbir Puar have noted, the horizon of LGBTQ liberation has often been folded into a homonationalism that quells queer subversion by making queer cultural legibility contingent on legibility to the state. Drag Race operates within this framework, in which queer life can only be imagined (and, perhaps, defended) from within imperial war-making. RuPaul's nationalism (in and out of drag) constantly incorporates the kind of patriotic jingoism you'd expect from a presidential speech or summer Hollywood blockbuster.

This isn't anything new for RuPaul. He has long supported national formations of gayness, drawing on a queer aesthetic that assimilates Americana and voicing a politics of inclusive state reform for LGBTQ populations, from the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell to same-sex marriage.

In 2013, RuPaul Tweeted that dating a military man was a "rite of passage" in the nation's most militarized cities like San Diego. Though somewhat veiled by his signature cheeky humor, this pride for America's military cannot be separated from the politics of the "war on terror" and the American military industrial complex. Many postcolonial and Asian American scholars have argued that cultural forms cannot be excised from the powerscapes they are constituted within.1 Acknowledging this is important not only because of the show's popularity as a representation of queer and drag cultures, but because drag more broadly reflects our cultural sensibilities and  displays our contested understandings of culture, race, sexuality, gender, class, and nation.

Trying to recover a queer politics from within this context is an attempt to intellectually regain the queer, the human, the Muslim, and their political and sexual desires, from the debris of the homonationalist "war on terror." Jasbir Puar, as do so many queer thinkers after her, frames the concept of homonationalism as the co-optation and suturing of queerness — rights, modalities, bodies — to a nationalist (war) agenda.2 In other words, Puar contends that the queer movement can only find a dead end from the nation-state's acceptance, a recognition made legible through legal frameworks such as same-sex marriage. This supposed acceptance of LGBTQ people into the national corpus, as in the expansion of gay rights — the homo — aligns with a liberal nationalism that promotes interventionist, imperial warfare abroad and pits a now queer-friendly U.S. (more accepting than before of gay rights, with gays in their military) against a racialized, illiberal Islam (look at how those Brown men treat their gays). And, further, these workings of homonationalism preclude a queer politics that firmly opposes anti-Muslim racism.

The homosexual nationalism in Drag Race feeds off and into an America understood as exceptional, where queer rights are celebrated in opposition to a supposed illiberal, anti-gay Islam; that religion, the one the terrorists who "hate us for our freedom" practice and weaponize. This operates on an explicitly racial logic "vis-à-vis Orientalist constructions of 'Muslim sexuality.'"3 Joseph Boone, in his study of the homoerotics of Orientalism, proposes that imperial ideas of the "Orient" depict the Muslim male as sexually deviant.4 What Boone helps us see, then, is that homonationalism as an alliance with the "war on terror" goes hand in hand with the racialization of the Muslim figure in American discourse. Imbricated in the imperial power dynamics of the "war on terror," the Muslim figure is racialized and rendered into a hyper visible target, marked, for example, by a beard. The racialization of Muslims, according to Junaid Rana and Sohail Daulatzai, historically morphs with "Islam shift[ing] from religion as ideological difference to a racialized object with a distinct state of racial being."5 The figure of the Muslim framed as a security threat surfaces a much longer Orientalist tradition of marking the "Muslim-looking" person as a suspicious subject to be surveilled — a homophobic, sexist, freedom-hating bogeyman.

The tropes, then, that homonationalism draws on under the "war on terror" have a long history that crosses over into minoritized communities including  queer communities. This form of homonationalism celebrates queerness if it can become sutured to anti-Muslim racism, drawing on longstanding Orientalizing racisms to serve a war on the "faces of terror." Drag Race too often unfolds within this insidious logic.

Take, for example, in season 3, episode 9, titled "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style," RuPaul opens the show declaring America the "best damn country on earth."6 She presents the contestants with the week's challenge: to record and send the "brave men and women serving our country overseas" a PSA. The episode was aired in March 2011, eight years into the invasion of Iraq (almost to the day). Contestants got into full drag and recorded messages to explain why America is the best damn country; as a requirement of the challenge, they performed the militaristic jingoism that justifies military actions such as America's wars of invasion.

While the contestants got dolled up in the Werk Room, most expressed how much America meant to them and, for many, their immigrant families. In their looks, the queens went full Americana, adorning red, white, and blue pin-up girl looks. Using hot dogs, flags, and the Statute of Liberty as props and cheerleading the nation, its troops (and their overseas military missions), the episode emphatically sutured (its version of) queer expressivity to America's "war on terror."

"Did you grow up patriotic?" one of the queens asked the others. The season's winner Raja Gemini (Sutan Amrul), an Indonesian American queen, responded that America was "a dreamland for me." Amrul was born in Los Angeles, spending many years of his childhood in Indonesia with a heterogenous religious upbringing — his Muslim father converted to Christianity at the request of Amrul's mother when Amrul was a child. But that season, Raja focused on how she represents an American multicultural dream, the first Asian American to win the competition. She was pitted against Manila Luzon, the runner-up, who more often drew on Asian motifs in competitions and either drew attention to or was marked by her Asianness.

The pairing of military-inflected patriotism with appeals to multiculturalism is an example of what critical race and ethnic studies scholar Christine Hong calls "militarized multiculturalism." Militarism tied to appeals to racial liberalism give "a redemptive liberal veneer to U.S. war politics in Asia and the Pacific."7 But this "liberal veneer" obscures the violence of military missions. Although Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, in the American imaginary it neither fits a predominant image of Islam, nor the ideas about Islam that the "war on terror" has relied on. In other words, Indonesia is not "brown" enough, not "Middle Eastern" enough, and not Southwest Asian/North African (SWANA) enough to be threatening. The presence of a "foreign" patriotic Asian American drag queen conveyed the season's overall theme: an inclusive, queer, multicultural America, and the need for military force to defend it. This defense of multicultural America requires that the cultural specificity of Manila Luzon's and Raja's geographically distinct origins get smoothed over, forming an Asianness that falls in line with and gives way to a supposedly broader national identity.

In addition to its casting choices, multicultural militarism becomes evident in the competition's mimicking of the capitalist logics exported through the nation's wars. RuPaul's drag empire often creates, refines, and propagates personal brands for the queens, becoming a global exporter and importer of drag cultures franchised for mass consumption. Many of these drag artists should be celebrated for their creativity and craft, but the social and state ideologies that frame the competition, especially its patriotic fervor, need to be seen for what they too often are: fierce lip service to American militarism.

Incorporating queer Drag Race contestants into the scripts for the "war on terror" may have celebrated particular elements of their own histories, but in Season 3, it represented a specifically Obama-era homonationalism that used a liberal gay rights framework: the freedom to be gay and in drag was assured, but only insofar as being gay and in drag could collaborate with imperial militarisms. This "soft" collaboration does not always read as active complicity, but nonetheless justifies and serves the militarist agenda. For example, Carmen Carrera talks to the other girls about how hard it was to fight to marry her husband. The implication is that the fight for same-sex marriage has made America exceptional. Other queens name family members who went to war. Shangela, in her PSA for a maxi-challenge, cooed that America was the "land of the free and home of the gays."8 And, at one point in her PSA, Alexis Mateo speaks directly to her military ex-boyfriend who shipped off to "serve his country," asking him to come back home. For the runway challenge she adorns his actual military jacket, which he left to her "as a memory." Parading down the runway, she embodies the U.S. military and its "liberalizing" mission, resonating with her earlier exchange with RuPaul where she professed America the only place — exceptionally — where one can grow up to be whatever they wanted, i.e. a drag queen.

This distinctly militarist homonationalism was again on full display in season 5's episode "Super Troopers." The contestants go to "booty camp" to train for the maxi challenge: putting a gay Marine that served before Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed into drag, incorporating them into their drag family. The episode was decked out with military tropes, from salutes to color guard routines. Countless times, RuPaul mentioned that the Marines fought for their freedom to dress up in drag, suggesting Drag Race's specific queer modality could not exist without America's wars abroad. The intimacy between RuPaul's queerness and militarism, suggested here and adjacent to the "rite of passage" military romance she Tweeted about, projects a fiction of American military protection for queer life.

Still, we can read against "war on terror" homonationalism in at least one moment: Season 12, Episode 9. In the skit "Choices 2020," Jackie Cox (Darius Rose) stood on stage adorned in Americana topped with a stars-and-stripes hijab in front of the judges' panel for a maxi-challenge. Jeff Goldblum, acting in his role as a guest judge, asked Jackie about Islam, its politics, and Muslims' capabilities to practice queerness:

Up there at the foot of the catwalk it must've been a wound re-opened, the insidious logic of the "war on terror" undermining her expression of herself. Even in that beloved queer space.

But beyond Goldblum's question, the entire 12th season was set up as a homonationalist narrative of inclusion coinciding with a presidential election season. In the premiere, a RuPaul voiceover asked: "Are you sick and tired of the same old political parties?" Airing from February to May 2020, every episode ended with the queens on the runway holding up posters encouraging viewers to register to vote. In episode 7, the young "star" politician Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, known affectionately (and sometimes not-so-affectionately) as AOC, was a guest judge. Jackie Cox made it a point to tell AOC how much she admired her. The show's characterization of Jackie was as someone politically savvy and conscious of how policy affects the world and her family, and she often served as a narrative foil for queens who identified as apolitical. Jackie offered a heartfelt response to the judges and in the confessional regarding the impacts that Trump's "Muslim ban" had on her own family.

The overarching political theme of season 12 was at its height in "Choices 2020." The remaining queens competed in a debate for Drag President. Some queens tossed fun insults back and forth. Widow VonDu pointed at Jackie and yelled "Terrorist!" VonDu was most likely satirizing the real-life racist tropes of some politicians. But guise or not, the statement traces a narrative lineage in the show that racialized Jackie Cox as Middle Eastern and Muslim, steeped in Orientalism.

In the same debate, Heidi N. Closet slings shade at Jackie, tongue-in-cheek: "How can we trust a drag queen when her five o'clock shadow is visible 24 hours out of the day." VonDu agreed: "If she can't win the war against her beard, how can she win the wars that we might have to fight for America."10 That the beard is the stalwart signifier for the "Muslim-looking" subject has been employed as criticism by artists like Riz Ahmed and his hip hop group Swet Shop Boys. In the song "T5" they sing about being racialized at the border at JFK airport: "Oh no, we're in trouble / TSA always wanna burst my bubble / Always get a random check when I rock the stubble."11 The five o'clock shadow Heidi pointed out is a bridge and points back to Widow's accusation: terrorist. Jackie Cox's beard came poking through early on, too, when, in the season's first episode, judge Michelle Visage reprimanded Cox for her stubble showing through her makeup: "One thing I'm going to tell you because you are of Persian descent and your hair is dark: we're already seeing the bleed-through on the beard." And, as if foreshadowing how Jackie's beard would haunt her throughout the season, Visage added, "This is going to be the bane of your existence." Another contestant, when creating a puppet of Jackie Cox as part of a challenge, caked on hair to the puppet's chin, a caricature of the stubborn, un-incorporated beard.

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid uses the beard throughout his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Changez, a Pakistani student who upon graduating from Princeton with a degree in finance, moves to New York City to begin work at a high-powered Wall Street valuation firm where he travels the globe to restructure companies according to the bottom line. None of his striving or ambition matters, it turns out: he precociously achieves fast success at his firm only to be completely rejected by the country after 9/11, and realizes that he is a foot soldier of the imperial, capitalist American empire. The plot is narrated, years after he has returned to Pakistan, by Changez to an unidentified American, to whom he says, by way of conversational invitation, "Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America."12 The novel is full of these funny asides; the juxtaposition of the unidentified American and the fearful beard that hates America's freedom is implied through the opening gambit and its hirsute signification.

After asking Jackie Cox about the anti-homosexual or anti-woman tendencies of Islam, Goldblum persisted: "Can I ask, are you religious?" (Can I ask, are you Muslim?) This need to categorize is an example of epistemological surveillance, subjecting Muslim people to being scholar Saher Selad calls "forever suspect."13 Cox's defense on stage was admirable, a tearful explanation that there are, in fact, LGBTQ Muslims and that her own family was affected by the Muslim ban, a clear a gatekeeping practice that rests on homonationalist notions about the Middle East and Islam. An interview she gave after the show aired best describes how her hijabi Americana opposes Goldblum and RuPaul's homonationalism: 

In this rebuttal, Jackie Cox understands how a queer Muslim figure upends the forces of exceptional American homonationalism.

Queering the racialized Muslim figure alongside Jackie Cox does offer a counternarrative to homonationalism, but it also leaves us asking, what does a denationalized gay modality look like? Feel like? Is it global, borderless? Does this queer modality fundamentally deride — not support — imperial militarism and racialized violence?

So much of our theory, our thinking through the world, comes from an event, a moment, an encounter — and expands. I often turn to Pakistani artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Jr. — who performs in drag as Faluda Islam, a bearded queer Muslim, sexually liberated deviant, and a threat to homeland security. Imagine the beard set beneath a heavy turquoise eyeshadow spilling out over thick eyebrows and well onto her forehead. Sometimes she's bald and other times her head is adorned with a keffiyeh. In one particular performance art piece by Faluda Islam, on the wall behind her there appears a phrase written in Urdu: "the guerrilla fighter's weapons." Icons of weaponry — a kalashnikov and a grenade decorated in bright colors — are hand-stitched into tapestries, looking a little like decals.

https://vimeo.com/370611147

And instead of a tightly-packed gay bar or Drag Race stage, Faluda Islam trades a tongue-in-cheek sexualized performance for a scene that mimics a martyrdom video. Faluda sits in high femme militant fatigues and summons an army of zombies — the "living dead" — borne from the constant drone of warfare. Faluda explains that the queer Muslim revolution has persisted and won, a complete repudiation of the pillars of "war on terror" homonationalism.

Maybe we can hear an apt echo of Jackie Cox and Faluda Islam's repudiation of imperial militarism's attempted cooptations of queer life, in Bhutto's own poetry: 

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Talib Jabbar (@talibali) is a doctoral candidate in literature and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also associate editor at Zócalo Public Square.

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