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…
Site Archives
Contemporaries Essays, Feel Your Fantasy: The Drag Race Cluster
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…
Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise
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…
Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise
“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…
Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise
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….
Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise
Wheel Men: The Blue-Collar Masculinities of The Fast Saga
Early in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), as Dom (Vin Diesel) and his team are regrouping after their first chastening encounter with Luke Evans’s supervillain Owen Shaw, Roman (Tyrese Gibson)…
Contemporaries Essays, For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise
Refusing Narrative Time as Grief Practice
After Paul Walker died in a car accident, Brian O’Conner got to live. Universal shut down production of Furious 7 with the film half-shot, before conferring with his family, deciding…