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It’s not simply that the couch juts into the camera’s frame, but that it is a bronze couch. Bronze with a garish sheen. A glossy bronze befitting a vintage 1970s…

There is an unobvious potentiality in Drag Race’s travels, one that sits alongside the negative and more obvious impacts of exporting “Americana on steroids” and invites us, perhaps, to approach…

RuPaul’s cultural impact in the Philippines is unmistakable. This past Fall, Drag Race Philippines released its first season and announced the winner, Precious Paula Nicole. Following the first season’s success,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…