part0007

If at first glance RuPaul’s Drag Race doesn’t seem to lend itself to philosophical exploration, we understand. It is, after all, a reality television show with the purpose of entertaining the viewer and showcasing talented artists. It is loud, colorful, and often silly. It’s a happy place you can just sink into at the end of another rinse-and-repeat day of the everyday life that we all agree could use more sparkle.

However, philosophers do not deal in first glances and a happy place is nothing if it is not mostly a happy illusion. We are in the insistent business of questioning what we see on stage and demanding to look behind the curtain. A utopia always ends up untucked, doesn’t it? Ever since Plato’s story of the cave, philosophers craved the untucked version of everything, since otherwise, as RuPaul aptly states, “you are only getting half the story.”

So we’re using these two-inch press-on nails with glittering French tips to scratch the surface of our beloved Drag Race , the better to see its intellectual hog body with clarity. There are plenty of topics, quotations, and implicit assumptions that are death-dropping for our attention. This rich intellectual foundation comes as no surprise to our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters and everybody allied in between because it’s a part of our international cultural heritage, which is even older than Lady Bunny.

What can be ignorantly glossed by the uninitiated as a “mere” reality television show is best explained by the fact that Drag Race builds on a long herstory of especially the black and Latinx queer community. The show does its part to extend and further this herstory, which has been marginalized and mis-characterized for many moons, and so now the show has inevitably become the vast Ru-niverse of positive possibilities we see today. References to the concepts, linguistic conventions, and habits of these subcultures are plentiful, and as Drag Race ascends to its rightful place as a cultural mainstream phenomenon, many people will miss the subtle and many times even not-so-subtle references to those roots. Who’s still stonewalling us, you know?

However, that is only a partial explanation. The other part is that RuPaul is not only a queen, but in many respects, she is the Queen . RuPaul has played an instrumental and unparalleled role in building up the Drag Race empire as an intellectual, and for many, even spiritual happy place. Her message of love, her characterization as “everyone’s drag mother,” her insistence on pushing contestants to and beyond their boundaries, her seeming and her actual contradictions, and so much more make RuPaul a philosopher in her own right and Drag Race her magnum opus. We still don’t know how big it will get, but it’s already much bigger than eight inches.

This makes Drag Race an unexplored philosophical playground, and we invite everyone to come play. Take for example the rather straightforward question: What makes a good drag queen? We can expect from a competition show that the criteria are clear and open, so the judges’ decisions are comprehensible. Yet, how do you compare queens like Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Jinkx Monsoon, Yara Sofia, and Sharon Needles with each other, since each of them pushes the arts and sciences of drag in a very different direction?

RuPaul offers a surprisingly direct answer: Be fierce. Fierceness is the prime virtue of drag queens, and the fiercer you are, the easier it will be for you to achieve the other virtues Ru demands of her contestants: charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. To be a C.U.N.T., you have to be fierce. And all of this is eerily similar to the way Aristotle tried to answer the question: What makes a good person? His answer is to be virtuous, just like RuPaul seems to assume.

However, the old Greeks were not about fierceness. They were about practical wisdom, or “phronesis.” Practical wisdom is to people in general essentially the same as what fierceness is to a drag queen: You need practical wisdom to determine the other virtues, like patience, generosity or courage. You cannot be too wise, just as you cannot be too fierce. We do not know how closely RuPaul has studied Aristotle in devising her implicit virtue theory of drag (honestly, we would not be surprised if Ru is secretly a Nicomachean Ethics fan), but it does easily demonstrate that she, and by extension RuPaul’s Drag Race , has a lot to offer philosophically.

But you knew that, so let’s get this show underway already. This volume gathers essays approaching RuPaul’s and the show’s philosophical foundation, both with humor and intellectual rigor. It was written by an international team of philosophers who are dedicated fans of the show just like you are. The range of topics werks the whole world of Drag Race and we hope you will find a few that are right up your alley. This anthology is not exhaustive, but it’s a start. We tried our best to keep each concept so clear that even Gia Gunn could understand it, no technical term unexplained and every philosopher well-introduced. If you find yourself struggling with an argument in the book, don’t hesitate to approach your local philosopher—but don’t forget to tip. Dollars make us holla, too.

It’s well past time that the worlds of drag and philosophy properly hook up, and we are happy to have played a role in getting the kai kai started. What could be better than having an excuse to re-watch our favorite television show over and over again? Go on and binge until your brain is as chunky and funky as Latrice Royale. We hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as we took pleasure in editing it. And we hope the whole wide world learns the virtue of sissying its thought.