RuPaul’s Drag Race cares about queer kids. Drag queens in the final episodes give advice to their younger selves. The show recites “drag family values” of accepting LGBTQ+ youth and…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
Bijuriya Chamke!: Curating my Drag Sound
Intro: Choices! Creating a drag persona involves making countless aesthetic, artistic, conceptual and political choices.1 In the early stages, as drag performers, our first choices might be circumstantial, random, or…
Can I Get an Amen? or: Citation and the Speech of Fantasy
Though it marks the end of each episode, RuPaul’s request for “an amen” is where I want to start because it distills, for me, the fundamental fantasy that animates the…
Reading Challenges: A Feel Your Fantasy Introduction
Before I watched any Drag Race, a first date showed me a clip of Season 9’s finale. Shea Couleé and Sasha Velour are about to engage in a semi-final lipsync battle…
2 Make Kin, 2 Make Memories: Care Ethics in The Fast Saga
At this point, The Fast Saga’s emphasis on family has become a running joke. In the explosively popular new TV series Abbott Elementary, when eager-beaver teacher Janine (Quinta Brunson) insists…
The Fast and Furious Formula: The Role of Family in Meaningful Work
For over twenty years now, The Fast Saga has provided audiences with much more than action-packed car chases and campy dialogue. Beyond the unrealistic stunts and often ridiculous plot twists, the films…
“For those ten seconds or less . . . I’m free”: Working Class Male Fantasies and Spatial Politics
At a time when working- and middle-class individuals and families are faced with decreasing social and economic mobility, the popular Fast and Furious franchise (The Fast Saga) offers audiences an…
Macrobrews and Melodrama in the Fast and Furious Franchise
A personal anecdote to start: long before I became a bureaucrat, I taught Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955). At first, the students sneered and laughed at the film….