5 Fight for Your Platform to Party: Brooklyn Drag and the Battle for a Queerer Facebook
In the religion of drag queens, the high holidays are Halloween and New Year’s Eve. In Brooklyn, there is also Bushwig, arguably the city’s most anticipated drag event of the year. Although the two-day festival has moved from its original home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to a new location in Ridgewood, Queens, the key components are the same—tents, stages, and dozens of high-heeled drag queens with meticulously applied makeup. Alternately nervous and excited, performers line up near the stage for their turn at a one-song set, which typically involves lip synching and dancing, in genres that can vary from hip-hop to pop to polka. Fans and spectators—queer and straight, mostly young, many dressed up so elaborately that they are indistinguishable from the performers onstage—mill around in the late summer heat, drinking beer, evaluating costumes and routines, and occasionally hooking up. Since 2012, the festival has been many things—a sensory overload of glitter, drama, hair dye, and glamour; a victorious display of dance, comedy, irony, and farce. It also reflects Brooklyn’s rapid transformation from a neighborhood dominated by light industry warehouses into one filled with coffee shops and bars. Importantly for drag culture, these changes accommodate not just a vibrant nightlife but a vibrant queer nightlife.1
Throughout the two days of the Bushwig, people snap photos of themselves and others, many of which will be uploaded to social media sites and disseminated across an international network of family, friends, fans, and followers. Within the local drag community, these media artifacts help individual performers to promote themselves and advertise upcoming shows. Although online networks now are commonly thought of as an audience (Litt 2012), for drag queens this is literally true. In addition to the work of making costumes and choreographing routines, drag queens undertake substantive work in their online performances, cultivating their fan bases by posting content and engaging with followers on social media.
Unlike the other two communities examined in this book, members of the Brooklyn drag community tend not to be interested in secrecy.2 After all, the nature of drag is fundamentally expressive and hypervisible. But although the drag queens I interviewed were largely uninterested in keeping their community secret, this does not mean that information is uncontrolled. Brooklyn’s drag queens are invested in taking advantage of social media platforms for both individual self-promotion and community support, benefits that help explain the ubiquitous use of Facebook and Instagram among performers. Yet the use of digital technologies comes with critiques of their potential for bias and discrimination, which drag queens associated with policies around names and queer identities.
In fall 2013, I interviewed members of Brooklyn’s drag community with Adam Golub, a documentary filmmaker and queer activist. We conducted a series of focus groups with fifteen queens, asking them about the role that social media played in their lives as performers. We also took advantage of a two-day drag arts festival held in Manhattan in November 2013 to conduct a workshop (attended by approximately forty people) as a way of getting feedback on key themes that emerged from the focus groups. In fall 2015, I conducted a small number of follow-up interviews to ask about any changes that had occurred in the community since the first round of interviews. In particular, I wanted to understand how Brooklyn’s drag community responded to Facebook’s 2014 “real-name” policy, later called its “authentic-name” policy, which led to the freezing or shutting down of the accounts of hundreds of drag queens because they had used a name other than their legal name. I return to this controversy at the end of the chapter in my discussion of authenticity as a design value for communities of alterity.
In this third field study, I look at how drag queens as a countercultural community use and make sense of mainstream digital technologies like Facebook and also how such tools fail to accommodate the fluidity and complexities of their lives. Careful examination of this community’s relationship to Facebook brings into relief a number of sociotechnical tensions that have been central to this book—between alterity and the mainstream, between the strategic and the tactical, and between the ways that technologies are designed and the ways that they are used in everyday life. By setting up comparisons between how Facebook and members of this community understand the concepts of authenticity and community, we can see the underlying logics that support some forms of identity work over others. I also work through different ways of thinking about and benefitting from community, particularly the gap between Facebook’s claim to being a global community and the queerer and more countercultural community of drag queens.
Context: Brooklyn’s Drag Renaissance
Typically, the word drag refers to a male-bodied performer who stages a hyperfeminized lip-synching of a female vocalist, often accompanied by dancing and comedy. Drag has a long history in New York, reflected in films such as Paris Is Burning and festivals like Wigstock, an annual drag extravaganza held in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s. In contemporary Brooklyn drag, the objective is rarely (or rarely just) female illusionism, which refers to a realistic and convincing performance of mainstream femininity. Instead, performers tend to be more interested in genderfucking and genderqueering or as one participant put it, being a “gender terrorist”—that is, playing with and disrupting conventional notions of femininity and masculinity.
Some examples from the Brooklyn drag scene can help to illustrate the distinction in these approaches to drag. I have seen an androgynous performer cover a Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song, including a lengthy interruption of robotic yet maniacal laughter, which she sporadically interrupted by shooting a confetti gun; a male-bodied performer don a strap-on penis over her own penis and testicles, which had been taped to her thighs;3 a drag ensemble satirize the transgendered villain from Silence of the Lambs, surrounded by goblins; and a drag queen dressed in Orthodox Jewish clothing, performing choreography that mimicked electrocution. These performances were not particularly invested in mainstream drag (as oxymoronic as that phrase may seem) but instead embraced a heterogeneous array of performance practices, stage personas, and sexualities. As described by one queen I interviewed: “We are not pageant queens. That’s the cool thing about what’s going on now. You can give what you want. You don’t have to really box it in. You can just let go and deliver what you want to present, which is really beautiful.” Another queen echoed this description: “I’ve been on the same bill as burlesque performers, twerkers—like, performance art that has nothing to do with drag as it is by the book, in terms of heels, hair, and makeup. The spirit, the intimacy of the scene is, I’d say, bigger than that. It’s more inclusive than that. It’s more performance oriented rather than fitting-into-the-mold oriented.”
All of the participants that I interviewed lived in Brooklyn, and all but one lived in the neighborhood of Bushwick. Since about 2010, Brooklyn has hosted what could be called a drag renaissance, and the nexus of this renaissance is Bushwick. About 125,000 people live in Bushwick, and about 40 percent of them are from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Although not a historically queer neighborhood, today it is a nexus of relatively affordable housing, reliable transportation, and proximity to a thriving urban nightlife, which follows neighboring Williamsburg’s trajectory of gentrification (Petrilli 2012). These factors have also supported an explosion in drag performances, as evidenced by an increase in the number of actively performing queens from four or five just a few years ago to approximately a hundred now (Bushwig 2014). At the time I was writing this book, live drag shows could be seen on any night of the week.
Figure 5.1 Map of Bushwick. The black arrows denote the Brooklyn neighborhoods of North and South Bushwick, conventionally referred to as a single entity, Bushwick. Image from the 2013 American Community Survey Profile of New York. Retrieved from maps.nyc.gov/census.
Drag as Queer Community
I have used the word community throughout this book, but the term takes on a particular valence in the context of queer identity and culture (Weston 1991). When drag queens embrace the term community, it has particular resonances (similar to the word family) of queer solidarity and mutual aid. Like people at the other two field sites that I investigated, when asked about their preferences for how to describe themselves, Brooklyn drag queens unanimously preferred community. As one participant explained:
It’s a community. There’s a definite community where we get together. We’ll go to each other’s shows. We’ll actually support each other. If anyone needs help in any way— If something drastically horrible happened, I’m sure I could text [another queen], and she would be there in a minute. It’s something that you can act upon, whereas maybe subculture is just a phenomenon that happens to a demographic.
Social support is central in the above definition of community, whereas subculture (for this participant) refers to an interest-based phenomenon. The distinction that emerges here is partly about solidarity and mutual aid but also about action and commitment. In other words, this definition of community is practice-based: community refers to something that people do, whereas subculture relates to demographics or something that people are. Describing community as a shared set of doing points to Étienne Wenger’s (1998) term community of practice (referenced in chapter 1) and also connects to my overall interest in sociotechnical tactics. Defining group as “community” is partly about shared values and ethics and partly about shared practices, including shared practices for digital technologies.
With parallels to the other field studies discussed in this book, participants liked the word community, yet they were not always inclusive or free from interpersonal policing. Consider the following focus group conversation between a new member of the community, who relates experiences of competition and hostility, and two more experienced drag queens, who present the community as welcoming and playful:
Participant 1:
I like community.
Interviewer:
Yeah?
Participant 2:
I feel like it is a community. I don’t feel like it’s heavily competitive.
Participant 3:
Yeah.
Participant 2:
Or a playground.
Interviewer 1:
Playground? [Laughter]
Participant 1:
I feel, like, when I approached it, it was competitive—
Participant 2:
Not sure.
Participant 3:
—at first—
Participant 1:
No, you’re right.
Participant 2:
Yeah.
Participant 3:
But it’s, like, if you take the view—
Participant 2:
It was very supportive.
Participant 1:
When you get over, you know, once I got over [the first few weeks].
Participant 2:
Because we see each other all the time. We see each other everywhere.
Participant 3:
But it’s nice to know that if you go somewhere, you’re going to know someone. [Laughs]
Participant 2:
Yeah.
Participant 1:
Yeah, yeah absolutely. It’s nice.
The starts and interruptions in this conversation stem partly from a key divergence in how much local status or history is required to feel that Brooklyn drag constitutes a community rather than a competition. The reality is that both perspectives are accurate. Even if Brooklyn’s drag community resembles a playground in terms of aesthetic experimentation, community members can nonetheless engage in interpersonal politics that (purposefully or not) can hinder participation.
Social Media and Drag Practice
In describing prior field studies, I focused on alternative technologies (such as message boards and BME’s IAM network) used by communities of alterity. This chapter is less concerned with countercultural technologies than it is with how members of a countercultural community adapt mainstream technologies like Facebook to meet their particular needs. Drag queens use a range of technologies in their lives as performers, including mobile phones, tools for body hair removal, sewing machines, and DJ equipment. The drag performers I interviewed tended to operate within mainstream social media platforms rather than develop their own digital technologies. In Michel de Certeau’s (1984) terms, they engaged in tactical practices within the strategic infrastructures of dominant social media platforms.
In interviews, I asked drag queens to list all the social media sites that in some way support their drag practices. Everyone used Facebook and Instagram, and far fewer used sites like Tumblr and Twitter (table 5.1). In the discussion that follows, I focus on Facebook, which was considered both a highly valuable tool and a source of contention. Instagram was seen as similarly necessary but more straightforward and did not provoke the same tensions of online identity work.
Instead of providing focus groups with a checklist of online platforms, I asked participants to list the social media sites that they used. This means that platform use is likely underreported for some of the less common sites (for example, more participants probably had YouTube and LinkedIn accounts but did not think to list them without prompting). Because of this self-reporting approach, some sites listed may not meet standard definitions of what constitutes a social network site (boyd and Ellison 2013). My intent was not to gather a statistically accurate dataset of online participation but rather to get a sense of which social media sites were considered most important to everyday life as a drag performer.
Building a Repertoire, Documenting a Journey
Social media sites are important tools for drag queens, both in terms of fans and fellow performers. Regarding the latter, social media allows newcomers (whether to Brooklyn or to the drag community) to forge social ties to existing community members and expose them to other users, events, and (less explicitly) social norms and values.
For example, one participant noted that tracing the social network of an established queen became an entry point to learning about the drag community:
I went and found her on Facebook and stalked all the shows she had been to in the past week and all the ones that she was going to for the upcoming weeks and started going to those. Through finding those events on Facebook, I found the other queens that were going to events and looked at their pages and the events they were going to and through actually going to these events met more people. It was this back and forth, from in person to online, building bridges and furthering connections until I had both an online and an in-person network of connections and events that I knew about and was familiar with. That’s why I’m here. If I hadn’t been able to start on Facebook and initially find things that way, I wouldn’t have had any idea where to even start.
In this account, Facebook articulated the social ties within the drag community and provided an aggregate calendar of events and performances, which became nodes of connection within the community.
Another participant described a similar path to developing ties within the drag community via Tumblr:
Tumblr is specifically how I met a lot of people in this Brooklyn drag scene. She’s not a drag queen, but I met [a local DJ] through Tumblr. Then through her, I sort of watched the branches move outward. I was meeting people who were involved in this performance art scene, made friends with them, and ended up going to performances.
Social media enables a vital process of “watch[ing] branches move outward,” which participants described as far more useful than offline approaches for integrating into the drag community. In our interview, this participant also noted that Tumblr was especially conducive to her interests in drag because the site has a devoted following among people with historically marginalized sexualities (Renninger 2015). She felt that the tagging functionality of Tumblr facilitated interest-based convergences, noting that the platform “brings people together, who even though for all intents and purposes might run parallel to one another, don’t really have that sort of thematic cinch.”
Participants described social media as being essential to the process of developing social networks, including a specifically queer community: “Yeah, so [Facebook] helped me find that gay community that’s out here, [and] along the road I fell into this group that slowly became a family, and a … community.” Given the widespread penetration of social media sites among adults (nearly two-thirds have at least one social media account, according to Perrin 2015), it is not surprising that platforms like Facebook and Tumblr facilitate social connectivity. In fact, several participants described themselves as being dependent on social media for information and communication:
Participant 1:
Without Facebook, there’s a lot of people who wouldn’t know about anything.
Participant 2:
I wouldn’t know about any of this.
Participant 1:
You know where to go because you check Facebook invites. … At least, that’s what I do. I’ll get on that week and make a list of where I have to be this week because I’ll remember via [Facebook]. I don’t know how even to be anything without being able to get on the computer and look what everyone’s doing and what’s happening. You’d just have to guess.
As Facebook develops features and tools for communication, such as location check-in and video chat, it has become increasingly important in social and professional interactions. In interviews, drag performers struggled to imagine their lives without Facebook, even as they disagreed with some of its features and design.
Beyond connecting people to each other, social media sites produce representations of drag practices and personas. Commitment to drag requires practitioners to continue to develop new routines and costumes, and social media sites offer a valuable means for documenting these changes over time. As one queen noted, “In the context of doing drag, the best thing about Facebook is being able to have a live anthology of your work, your growth, your development. It’s just that you can go back at any given moment and see where you started and see everything.” Another participant agreed, noting that Facebook acted as an archive of her changing drag practice, reflecting shifts in costumes and increased skill in drag as an art form: “Everyone has a journey in their drag. Everyone looks very different when they start to where when they are now.”4 When I asked drag queens about photos and videos that were available through their online social networks, they talked about these videos as a source of inspiration and self-critique. One queen explained:
Looking back at old pictures and studying them and looking at things that [are useful] because your makeup constantly changes. You have to try new things, and then you’ll go back and look at things you liked or things that you [want to change]. I’ve done that a lot, where I’ve looked back and [seen] what’s changed. Either I want to pull it back in, or I’m like, “Good thing that changed.”
Performers who think of Facebook as an online “anthology” experience both short- and long-term gains. In an immediate sense, they can use social media to self-promote and solidify social ties with their fan base and with other performers. In the long term, drag queens are able to catalog their routines and costumes, which becomes an important resource for developing their evolving stage personas.
In addition to archiving and learning from their own performances, participants used Facebook to track and study the evolution of other performers. One focus group participant described using Instagram to teach herself how to “paint,” referring to the application of the heavy makeup required for her routines:
It’s a game I play. I’ll go on Instagram and enter a hashtag [related to drag]. Then I have a rule. Whoever comes up—whatever queen it is, famous or not famous or whatever—I’ll study her face and try to match her makeup exactly. And of course, it always comes out looking totally different. But that’s how I challenge myself to learn new skills.
Similar to the way that YouTube serves as a source of ad hoc, how-to guides, social media offers queens a means of DIY instruction, allowing for informal knowledge sharing of makeup, styling, and choreography that supplements in-person mentorship (for example, having a drag “mother” who takes new performers under her wing). As a whole, social media offer the benefits of increased connectivity, personal archiving, and online skill sharing.
The online archiving of drag performances and culture is sustained largely by audience members who are armed with smartphones and social media accounts, and participants generally assumed that their live performances would generate digital artifacts that could later be circulated through Instagram and Facebook. Online audiences included their fans as well as other queens, and many performers I interviewed were invested in maintaining control over the media representations that surface from their performances: “I don’t set it up for a photographer to be there, but you can be assured that when I get home, after I take the face off, I’m on Instagram—like, searching every hash tag possible and praying there’s a good photo.” I observed this work of culling through social media documentation in the days following the Bushwig festival, when performers were involved in a flurry of back-and-forth Facebook posts as they tracked down the best videos and photos of their performances.
Social media curation work is particularly important in the context of self-promotion. Just as social media connections enabled newcomers to gain entry into the Brooklyn drag community, an ongoing social media presence allowed performers to maintain connections to their online audiences. One participant described her commitment to maintaining a separate Facebook account for her drag persona:
It’s claiming a presence a little bit, connecting, mostly having some place where people can go because you meet people out in the nightlife. But the second you leave that bar, [my drag persona is] done. She actually gets washed down the drain, and I go to bed. But in the morning, people are still going to remember [her because of Facebook].
Drag queens are in face only during performances. In everyday life, most participants move through the world as gay men. In this sense, social media representations are more permanent than the events themselves, providing a record of drag performances that long outlives the live version.
Social media sites are a core technology in Brooklyn’s drag community. The drag queens that I interviewed valued these platforms as a key resource for documenting past performances and planning future ones. The circulation of images and videos from drag performances also matters for promoting events and connecting drag performers to their fans and other drag performers. These drag performers could not imagine their community without the support of social media platforms, but they felt dependent on Instagram, YouTube, and particularly Facebook, which produced a set of concerns about the role that these technologies played within the community. In addition to experiencing a general sense of fatigue with mainstream digital technologies, participants described a tension between their identities as drag performers and Facebook as a platform that they perceived as monolithic, inflexible, and straight.
Fatigue Sets In: The Platform That Drag Queens Love to Hate
Interviewees voiced a sense of fatigue with Facebook and digital technologies in general, expressing exasperation about feeling obligated to be online to participate in the drag community. For example, one queen commented, “I love technology, but I have issues with it. I feel like it’s made people become robots in a way. You go anywhere, and everyone’s like [making texting sounds], just not talking. I guess it’s just a sign of the times, but I miss human interaction.” Despite their often sensational and exotic drag personas, participants often felt that it was too difficult to stand out in a crowded Facebook newsfeed. As one participant explained, “I do create events for [upcoming shows], but now everyone and their mother is invited to fifteen events a day. It’s hard. I don’t look at my events. I miss a lot of things just because I’m unaware of it now.” In an online market for attention that is saturated with invites and updates from friends, family, coworkers, and casual acquaintances, even drag queens struggled to capture attention. Participants also expressed fatigue with both sending and receiving Facebook invites, even as they genuinely valued the ties that they had formed online. Social media practices of self-promotion often felt mandatory, a necessary means for staying connected to their fans and each other. At the same time, these performers were very aware of competition for attention, not just from other queens but from the platform as a whole.
In addition to feelings of exasperation and fatigue with constant social media use, participants reported that Facebook was a source of drama and interpersonal tensions (not unlike IAM’s terms of service forum). Interpersonal drama tracked largely between individual performers, whereas online social support was exchanged between performers and fans. One participant explained: “I feel like a lot of people are really shady, especially on Facebook. I feel like when it comes from certain artists to artists, it’s really just shade. But when it comes from a genuine supporter, it’s always going to be positive.” Based on an analysis of drag performers’ Facebook use, there was no shortage of drama between the queens that I friended, with people mounting attacks and staging defenses as a regular feature of feeds and public messages. But this is the case for any online community, from high school friends (Marwick 2014) to feminist activists (Clark forthcoming). In the drag queen community, however, drama often plays a particular countercultural function.
Much like the mainstreaming of body modification (discussed in chapter 3), drag culture has been increasingly exposed to a mainstream (i.e. straight and white) audience. Thanks to television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, parts of drag culture have been picked up in popular conversation, particularly the words shade and (to a lesser extent) read. The word shade refers to passive-aggressive hostility directed at another person or event, and reading refers to the back-and-forth, antagonistic exchange of insults between two drag queens (Livingston, Gibson, and Oppenheim 2005). Both terms derive from black street culture, in which drag balls and vogueing have their roots. When I was conducting fieldwork in 2013 and 2015, people far outside the community were using terms like shade to refer to anything from an incorrect bar tab to a political candidate’s debate performance. Given the near-ubiquitous use of social media platforms among drag performers, it is not surprising that shade transpires online. As one participant put it: “There is a lot of friendship, but it’s queens. Everyone’s a bit catty sometimes. Nightlife by nature is that way.”
Any qualitative accounting of Brooklyn’s drag community (and probably any drag community) needs to acknowledge the role that shade plays in interpersonal communication between queens—a backstage counterpart to the onstage performances. Given the importance of social media within Brooklyn’s drag community, it is inevitable that interpersonal tensions will surface on Facebook walls and Instagram posts. Yet the most critical comments I heard from participants about social media had little to do with users of Facebook and everything to do with Facebook’s policies for how people should display their names and identities online.
In addition to exasperation and fatigue with social media, some participants expressed hesitation regarding the community’s reliance on social media as a form of documentation. With a blend of anxiety and resignation, they described Facebook as imperfect but inescapable:
Facebook is, like, all we have anymore, too, though. To create an archive [of our community], it’s all we have. You’re not really going to find SD cards, definitely not anything like printed-out photos anymore. You have to go to Facebook. We’re depending on servers somewhere in the ether to preserve all our evidence of ourselves.
The stakes of this archival dependence were both personal and high. Performers took for granted that their shows would be documented and shared, and they enjoyed having access to photos and videos of their drag lives, which helped them to evaluate old routines, brainstorm new ones, and promote upcoming events. Their comments about social media’s imperfections stem not from the documentation and sharing of documenting their lives but rather from the near monopoly of the archiving. All of this documentation is gathered in a single vault—Facebook. Additional reservations concern Facebook policies that conflict with countercultural values, which I take up in the next section.
“Facebook Is Antidrag”: Tensions of Online Realness
In the context of drag identity, no social media policy has been as controversial as Facebook’s “real-name” rule. This policy has its roots in the platform’s origins among elite universities. When Facebook was available only to students at Harvard, a school email address served as proof of affiliation and thus eligibility for an account. As Facebook expanded, it retained the policy of linking a user to an institutionally verified identity, citing commitments to safety. The refusal to accommodate pseudonyms has long been disputed by some privacy activists and Internet users, who point to early web history when pseudonyms were the norm (boyd 2012). In September 2014, tensions revolving around “real” names came to a head when Facebook froze over two hundred accounts belonging to drag queens. These users were told to use account names that corresponded to their legal identities, verified by state-issued identification documents, such as a driver’s license. Given that Facebook was merely enforcing a longstanding policy, administrators did not expect the degree of outrage that ensued. An online petition from Change.org (Change.org 2014) gathered 45,000 signatures in a few weeks. Protests were held across the United States, with some of the most organized in San Francisco and Seattle. On October 2, 2014, Facebook issued a formal apology and announced the decision to overhaul the policy (Seals 2014; Tracer 2014).
In the wake of this controversy, Facebook instituted a number of policy tweaks. Its photo identification policies are triggered when text-based verification procedures are not possible. People who have names that correspond to conventionally accepted documentation can confirm their identity through one form of government identification or two forms of nongovernment documents. People who cannot verify their everyday names through either of those methods can submit two nongovernmental forms (such as mail or membership cards) and one additional identification (government-issued or not) that includes a photo or birthdate that matches the data entered on the Facebook account. The name on the third ID does not have to match the first two and is not added to the public Facebook account. The complex arrangements of documents at work in this agreement speak to the difficulty of pinning down a concept as multifaceted and elusive as a person’s authentic identity. The adjusted policy reflects Facebook’s expanded and more nuanced understanding of real names, demonstrated by the change in the policy from “real name” to “authentic name” in 2015.
In November 2015, I conducted an interview with Eva, a drag performer whose account was frozen in October for violating the authentic-name policy, a full year after Facebook promised to deal with this issue. In describing her experience, Eva addressed the stakes of having a Facebook account as well as the ways that individual identity is built into Facebook’s design as a platform:
Facebook is the way a lot of us promote events and talk to each other, recognize each other. [There are] a lot of people who identify through different identities, whether it’s drag or the person is transgendered or just has a different identity for several other reasons and maybe doesn’t have the resources to get those changes on their ID. It becomes a difficult place where you can’t be who you want to be. You have to be who the government tells you to be. That’s why I think it’s really shitty. That’s why I was kind of pissed. I feel kind of guilty because I didn’t really think about it until it happened to me. At first, I was just, like, “Get over it. It’s just a name.” Then I was, like, “Oh, fuck.” My thing is, I think it’s hypocritical for Facebook to ask you what’s on your mind but then censor you in such a way.
Eva’s description covers a lot of ground—the need for drag performers to use Facebook, the different groups affected by Facebook’s policy, and the paradox of identity censorship imposed by a platform that ostensibly is designed for expression. Given the amount of time, emotional labor, and artistic energy that Eva invested in Facebook, she responded to the account freeze with indignation and anger. Although Facebook purports to be a platform for self-expression, drag queens and others with fluid identities expose the ways in which only some expressions of identity are supported by Facebook’s structure and policies.
As Eva noted, these kinds of policies matter for a number of groups besides drag queens, including transgender people who may not be out to their entire social networks (Haimson, Brubaker, et al. 2016); Native Americans and others who adopt multiple names to reflect their heritage (Phillip 2015); survivors of child abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence; and police and journalist informants. All of these groups have a stake in the social media rules that surround names, and the capacity of online technologies to accommodate messy, fluid, or countercultural perceptions of identity. Yet one reason that Facebook’s real-name policy gained so much traction among drag queens is that the word real is loaded in the context of drag. In ball culture, the word realness historically referred to the ability to perform a particular gender convincingly. Contemporary queer and feminist theory positions the rhetoric of realness as narrow-minded in conceptualizing gender and sexuality, particularly regarding trans people (Bailey 2011). Realness thus becomes part of a reductive, essentializing treatment of gender, and it was epitomized in Facebook’s narrow concept of realness as something exclusively determined by a type of email address or official identification.
Many drag queens were aware of Facebook’s real-name policy before the 2014 confrontation and had circulated tactics for how to get around it. As a participant in a 2013 focus group explained:
Facebook is antidrag. It was made by the guys at Harvard who were meaning for college kids to hook up with each other. You didn’t know how Facebook developed? You haven’t seen The Social Network? When they opened [Facebook] up to the general public, it assumed that everyone has a first name and a last name. … I remember having to hack Facebook into letting me have one name. There was some tutorial where I had to trick my computer into thinking I was in Indonesia where they have one name. Then I had to change my language to Indonesian on Facebook. I have all the buttons memorized by the little Indonesian words. [Another queen] told me something changed, and she was, like, “The Facebook found me out.” I was, like, “Oh, shit.” I’m just a ticking time bomb waiting for them to demand a photocopy of my driver’s license, which is the sixteen-year-old Christian kid from Alabama with braces and everything.
The central tension here was between users with complex relationships to identity and a platform that refused to accommodate those kinds of complexities. Presented with Facebook’s strategies for organizing identity around first and last names, this participant developed tactics that resulted in considerable inconvenience (including claiming a false heritage and using an interface in a language that she could not read) as acceptable trade-offs for obtaining a user name that matched her stage name.
These comments also point to a design implication of how Facebook as a platform polices countercultural identity, an implication that touches on both legibility and authenticity. A key source of tension among the drag queens I interviewed is the lack of legibility in Facebook’s mechanisms for policing membership. Accounts are frozen or locked through invisible processes of reporting. Without the ability to confront or even identify the users who flag profiles, drag queens voiced their own theories for explaining these decisions, often assigning them to larger narratives of homophobia and transphobia. When I asked one participant about why she thought that two of her friends had their accounts frozen in fall 2015, her response was immediate and damning: “Facebook is run by a bunch of homophobes.” Although Facebook calls itself a community in the documents that explain its authentic-name policy, the lack of legibility in reporting keeps Facebook from feeling like a community to users who fall outside the scope of its dominant narratives of users.
Although the real-name policy provoked the most resentment among participants, as a whole Facebook was characterized as corporate, straight, and somewhat inflexible, even in design decisions that were less directly in opposition to drag identity. For example, Facebook’s introduction of the Timeline (a feature that provides a stream of photos and updates and was introduced in 2011 and 2012) (Facebook 2016) required retroactive management of media, as discussed by participants in one focus group:
Facebook changed, and now they have photos from when you were born. … I manage all my photos—like, all these photos that [showed up] when the new Facebook changed. Now no one can see my old photos.
Remember when [another queen] posted a photo on Facebook—like, from when I did drag four years ago? [Laughter] Of course, my makeup wasn’t fierce, and people were like, “Oh, my God!” and I was like, “Bitch, you better take that off.”
Facebook’s design decisions affect its entire user population, and many people besides drag queens felt inconvenienced or unnerved by the timeline as a platform intervention (Hamburger 2012). For example, the timeline feature is emotionally loaded for trans people who are trying to manage a diverse social network in which only some people might be aware of a user’s transition (Haimson and Hoffman 2016). For drag queens and others who carefully manage their online media presence as part of the relational labor of maintaining social and professional relationships, the sudden emergence of uncurated photos into a highly curated stream of media was described as particularly disruptive.
As Sherri Grasmuck, Jason Martin, and Shanyang Zhao (2009, 164) note in their article on ethnoracial identity on Facebook, “the interface of Facebook makes some choices for users unavoidable while others are unavailable.” In response to Facebook’s “antidrag” interface with its alternately unavoidable and unavailable choices, drag queens developed various tactics of subversion and protest to cope with and contest what participants perceived as the platform’s demands for simple, heteronormative expressions of identity.
Conclusions
As recently as February 2016, drag queens in my network were still having their accounts frozen, although a December 2015 policy change was intended to resolve this issue for once and for all. In addition to the expanded identification options outlined earlier in this chapter, the new policy on accepted IDs includes mail addressed to a user’s preferred name and information from users’ social feeds (Holpuch 2015). For example, a search through a user’s messages that shows multiple friends addressing the user by her preferred name becomes a form of name verification. The new policy also asks those who report name violations to describe how the user being reported is violating a policy, which could potentially decrease the number of complaints motivated out of homophobia or transphobia. Although these revisions are an important step, they still do not address a practice that was common among the queens I interviewed, which is maintaining both a queen account and a boy account. Currently, Facebook still insists that users maintain only one account.
Yet even if Facebook’s newest policy tweaks address its most divisive design problems, the controversy over “authentic” identity is revealing in the context of countercultural identity and digital media platforms. Facebook does not allow users flexibility in reshaping the platform’s interface. However odd someone’s interests are or unusual someone’s name is, these differences are flattened out into homogeneous metadata fields that are identical in structure, if not in content. Within the rigid structure of Facebook’s profile template, drag queens developed their own tactics of flexibility, evidenced in practices of maintaining multiple accounts (boy and queen, everyday and performer) and tricking the platform into thinking that a user was from a country like Indonesia to avoid rules about surnames. My arguments that online platforms should offer sociotechnical flexibility to support countercultural communities should not suggest that ad hoc tactics are not possible on mainstream platforms like Facebook. My point is that whereas a countercultural platform would see this kind of flexibility as a design value to be fostered, corporate platforms like Facebook see these tactics as a violation of community standards.
In addition to Facebook’s tendency toward inflexibility, its user policies also lack legibility. As Kate Crawford and Tarleton Gillespie (2014) argue in their review of flagging policies across social media sites, platforms often offer flags so that users can monitor each other’s behavior according to a set of rules, typically the terms of service or user guidelines. Yet individuals who attempt to contest Facebook’s policies encounter an infrastructure that is meant to be navigated rather than critiqued. The drag queens I interviewed regarded Facebook’s real-name/authentic-name policy as homophobic and prejudiced, which suggests that there is a need for a legible process that allows people who flag and are flagged to understand the procedures shaping their engagement with the site and other users. A meaningful commitment to legibility would require the adjudication process to be more than nominally participatory, in the sense that users can participate by flagging content that they see as inappropriate or offensive. To better accommodate complex, messy and queer identities, the process needs to be legible, meaning that users can easily trace and contest the reporting structure for alleged violations of Facebook’s policies.
Given these constraints on flexibility and legibility from the viewpoint of countercultural communities, how can mainstream social media sites be made to fit local needs? Within the scope of legibility, flexibility, and authenticity, Facebook’s change of the name of its naming policy from real-name to authentic-name is (unintentionally, of course) fitting. Although Facebook’s definition of authenticity is clearly different from mine, we both agree that as people continue to use online technologies in their everyday lives, authenticity is at once desirable, valuable, and problematic.
People use online platforms for a wide range of social functions, including professional and educational needs, dating, parenting, hobbies, religion, and ethically questionable activities like fraud and theft. Not all of these goals are well-suited to Facebook’s value of authenticity, which links online identity work to a rigid, mainstream notion of self and individuality. After analyzing public comments from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the topic of anonymity, authenticity, and identity, Oliver Haimson and Anna Lauren Hoffmann (2016, sec. “The Disconnect between Discourse, Design, and Authentic Presentation,” para. 3) concluded:
If we accept authenticity and identity as something that is constructed or performed in context, and if some constructions or performances cannot be reconciled with Facebook’s “real name” policies, then we begin to see the ways that Facebook simultaneously demands and forestalls authentic presentation.
I have described authenticity as the capacity of online technologies to accommodate local values and ethics or the ability of platforms to allow users to see themselves in the technologies that they use. In closing this chapter, I consider the concept of authenticity in terms of how the drag queens I interviewed navigated the perceived straightness of Facebook and what it means for digital technologies to support countercultural forms of belonging by allowing them to misfit rather than fit neatly within a platform.
After the 2014 policy debate, many people asked why Facebook should appease drag queens. After all, if they don’t like Facebook’s policies, they don’t have to use its service. But this argument fails to appreciate the amount of labor that users put into maintaining their Facebook accounts, the content they post and curate, the conversations they have, and the connections they form—all of which provide the data that Facebook monetizes in its advertising. Telling users that they can simply go elsewhere if they don’t like the rules dismisses the extent to which they need to be viewed as stakeholders in the sites that depend on user-generated content (Brunton and Nissenbaum 2015). In addition, although no platform can be all things to all people, when people who are disproportionately affected by a given policy are the same people who have been historically disenfranchised and marginalized, a platform needs to ask whether its policies are not only exclusionary but discriminatory.
Although they were not the first to protest Facebook’s real-name policy, drag queens made headway with Facebook where others did not for two key reasons: they embraced their lack of fit within the system, and they acted collectively. One important factor to their success was that rather than looking for ways to make their queerness fit into a straight interface, drag queens drew on a range of practices that celebrated their alterity. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2011, 592–593) work on the concept of the misfit is useful here:
fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward attempt to fit them together. … Misfits are inherently unstable rather than fixed, yet they are very real because they are material rather than linguistic constructions. The discrepancy between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is, produces fits and misfits.
Although Garland-Thomson does not use the concept of misfitting to consider issues of values in design, her work is instructive in the context of drag queens and social media. The core components of misfits—their instability, their materiality, and their emergence from the actual rather than the expected—can be applied to how drag queens perceived their relationships to Facebook as a mainstream, sociotechnical platform.
Participants’ tactics for using Facebook reflect an attempt to manage this “discrepancy between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is.” Initially, these tactics concentrated on workarounds and hacks, such as listing oneself as Indonesian to circumvent the first-name/last-name requirement. When accounts were frozen, the stakes of misfitting grew higher, and instead of fitting themselves into a platform that they perceived as too strict (and too straight), drag queens fought for ways to retain their status as misfits, insisting on their authenticity within Facebook as a platform. Authenticity—the ability of users to see themselves in the policies and design of a site that they use every day—moved to the center of the debate.
A second important factor in their success was that drag queens are typically comfortable with visibility in ways that other groups affected by the real-name policy—survivors of sexual assault and child abuse, for example—might not be. The very source of stigma that makes drag queens a target for the flagging of their accounts lends itself to an aptitude for raising awareness and garnering attention. In addition to this embrace of a sociotechnical misfit, drag queens were able to effect change because they acted collectively rather than individually. Drag queens led an initiative to demand changes to Facebook’s policies, which would not have been possible if the initiative had been undertaken by an individual misfit; a community of misfits was required.
Remembering the preferred terms among participants in this study, Brooklyn drag queens overwhelmingly described themselves as a community and as nested within larger queer, artistic, and urban communities. The layering of networks emerged as an organizing tactic for drag queens who wanted to protest Facebook’s policy. In addition to working within their own community to demand action, they built coalitions with other groups whose identities were misfits with Facebook’s identity policy. Drag queens’ willingness to build external alliances demonstrates the efficacy of acting collectively and was a key factor in their successful call for platform policies that could better accommodate misfits.
Given the effect that community action can have in forcing a policy change, I want to close by considering what community means in a conventional Facebook context versus a countercultural context. When Facebook calls itself a community, it refers to its goal of creating a hospitable framework for its many users.5 For example, its “Community Standards” document (Facebook 2016) states that “the conversations that happen on Facebook reflect the diversity of a community of more than one billion people” and that “our global community is growing every day and we strive to welcome people to an environment free from abusive content.”
On the surface level, we might consider to what extent any group with one billion people could be considered a community. Is China a community? The global south? When is it useful to think of Christians as a community? Republicans? Marxist feminists? But even setting aside the question of whether and how a community scales, there are questions of what kinds of community are imagined as belonging to the Facebook community. People under age thirteen are not welcome in Facebook’s community, for instance, nor are people who seek to produce a sense of social connectivity by circulating sexually explicit images. And until recently, people whose account names did not match their state-issued ID did not belong either.
Rather than trying to carve out a coherent sense of community in its standards, Facebook’s concept of community is vague and loosely articulated in instructions for how to report abusive behavior and protect users’ intellectual property. In this sense, Facebook’s stance toward community is similar to what writers like Miranda Joseph (2002) have critiqued in the use of the term in the social sciences. For Joseph, the word community has become an empty signifier laden with valences of anticapitalism and social equality and uncontested in its status as an unequivocally good thing. But communities are typically rife with the same power structures that underlie capitalism and often lack social equality. In fact, communities are not always good things, either for their constituents (such as cults that involve nonconsensual sex) or within larger social spheres (such as domestic terrorist groups).
Countercultural groups cannot afford to adopt a similarly rosy or vague view of what it means to belong to their community, online or offline, if they want to survive. This is why IAM’s terms of service were integral for its users and why New Brunswick punks were sometimes critical of but ultimately stood by the sociotechnical practices that simultaneously protected them from the police and created exclusionary politics. Like Brooklyn drag queens, these groups see themselves as a forming community because they share specific ethics and norms, which manifest in their treatment of digital technologies.
I am not suggesting that Facebook be demonized as soulless and capitalist or as opposed to alterity (generally) or drag queens (specifically). Throughout this chapter, I document the ways in which participants enjoyed and benefitted from using Facebook in their lives as performers and queer people. I see a shared practice-based understanding in both Facebook’s and Brooklyn drag queens’ approaches to community. Recall that participants defined themselves as belonging to a local community partly because of how they performed drag, a definition based on what they do rather than who they are. Similarly, in its community guidelines, Facebook offers a list of do’s and don’ts for reporting behavior and policies on abusive language, which also can be viewed as a practice-based approach to defining community. The fundamental difference here is in tying these practices to a local set of values and norms, which I have labeled as authenticity.
Whereas Facebook conceptualizes community as the lowest common denominator of shared online interaction, drag queens think of community as a set of commitments to gender, sexuality, on-stage aesthetics, and alterity. They see their community as one of misfits, and moreover as a community of misfits to be celebrated from the outset, even while filling out the data fields of a profile. Instead of viewing community as something that happens within the site itself, countercultural communities see the politics of online platforms at the design level. Many aspects of a site—the profile metadata, the terms of service, the display of social networks, and the policies for verifying identity—can either support or exclude countercultural identities, allowing members to fit in or be misfits. The gaps between supporting and excluding point to the capacity of digital technologies to provide a sense of belonging to communities of alterity.
