If drag is female empowerment, one shudders to think what mockery looks like.
This past week, the BBC canceled RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, citing ongoing financial pressures across the broadcaster.
Whatever prompted the decision is incidental. The minds of television executives are inscrutable. It is clear, however, that this is no great moral victory. The original American series completed its 18th season in April and has already been renewed for a 19th, and Drag Race UK itself will simply move to another platform. Demand for the camp, glamour, and titillation remains high.
The reaction to Drag Race UK’s cancellation, however, is revealing about what the show and the so-called art of drag are intended for in the first place.
In a piece in The Guardian responding to the news, the subhead declared “The hyper-flamboyant and hilariously filthy show is an inclusive, celebratory platform for queer culture. The broadcaster’s choice to nix it is giving stupidity.” There is something revealing in the assumption. Drag Race has acquired the moral status of “representation”: To remove it from the BBC is not merely to cancel a reality-television program but, somehow, to deprive a marginalized group of its place on screen.
Credit where it’s due to RuPaul: He and his band of queens have pulled off a remarkable cultural trick. Drag Race demands “realness” of its contestants in their reproduction of particular standards of female beauty: Men strap on exaggerated breasts, cinch their waists, paint enormous lips and glue false eyelashes onto their faces, adopt female names, call one another “b*****s,” make jokes about vaginas, and compete over who can perform the most exaggerated version of femininity. Progressive culture looked at this arrangement and decided that the people deserving protection from ridicule were the men. Yes, of course. My apologies, RuPaul. That should have been obvious.
The veneer of progressivism obscures what would otherwise be seen as unacceptable.
What makes drag exempt from other progressive cultural taboos is difficult to identify. Blackface is rightly condemned because reducing another race to exaggerated physical features and mannerisms does not cease to be degrading when called entertainment. While the histories are obviously different, it is less obvious why the principle shouldn’t apply universally. More recently, the same logic has been extended to Halloween costumes: dressing up in the stereotyped features of another group can be condemned as cultural appropriation even when no insult is intended. Yet give a man artificial breasts, multiple tubes of concealer, and a repertoire of sexual stereotypes about women, and the caricature is transformed from degradation into “representation.” Cultural-appropriation arguments don’t ordinarily disappear when someone says, “But I meant it as a tribute.”
Defenders of drag point to a theatrical pedigree stretching back to Shakespearean comedies. I suppose you could find a way to interpret Twelfth Night as the great-grandfather of drag, though the mental gymnastics it would take are gravity-defying. It’s hard to believe that those performers had quite the same vision in mind as those who deck themselves out on RuPaul’s show today.
Even granted that pedigree, the relevant question isn’t whether men have ever dressed as women onstage. It is: What does Drag Race ask its performers to do with femininity? The answer: “Drag is about men denigrating women for the amusement of other men.”
Drag Race is not sashaying away anytime soon; one of its many franchises has merely changed channels. But the reaction to its departure should prompt a question that all the talk of inclusion and representation has strangely neglected: if this is representation, even a supposed celebration of women, I shudder to think what honestly labeled mockery would look like.