Serving 'Reality' Television 'Realness
Reading RuPaul's Drag Race and its Construction of Reality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4750037 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Ward (0000-0001-9124-0234, Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 23-40 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative American Studies An International Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1477-5700 • E-ISSN: 1741-2676 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14775700.2020.1720407 |
| OpenAlex | W3005460549 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 7 |
Despite the increasing visibility of queerness and queer folks in American popular culture, there is a concerning dissonance between this symbolic cultural progression, and the reality of queer lives that continue to be marked by discrimination, oppression, and violence. This article considers the ways in which RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009) simultaneously constitutes this increase in queer visibility, and yet also perpetuates specific hierarchies of subjectivity which work to maintain hegemonic power. There is a particular irony here: this television programme is both promoted and consumed through the lens of increasing queer access to the public sphere through visual representation, and yet because of the ways that it legitimises certain specific queer identities, works to delegitimize others, rendering them invisible and/or inferior
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Invisibility · Irony · Literature · Media studies · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Queer · Reality television · Reality tv · Sociology · Subjectivity · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2023 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |