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Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

Piñata Drag: Crystal Methyd and The Pleasures of Quirky Latinx Aesthetics

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

Drag Queens Everywhere

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

“I Love You Dearly, Bitch”

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,…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

Queer Childhoods and Drag Race

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, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster

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…

Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise

Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise

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…