part0010

R uPaul’s Drag Race has taught us heaps about drag culture; we have learned about its aesthetics, its history, its ongoing struggles, but also its language. The show has introduced us to a whole array of new vocabulary, like tea, werk , and kiki , and to a wide variety of different things we can do with our words, from RuPaulogizing, to spilling tea, to throwing shade and reading. BenDeLa’s quote above is a classic read from the infamous mini challenge The Library , which occurs in every season of Drag Race .

The Library challenge pays homage to Paris is Burning , the landmark 1990 documentary about late 1980s New York ball culture. In this documentary we find what philosophers would call the loci classici , or the most authoritative and important definitions, of the concepts of reading and throwing shade. They are offered to us by the imposing Miss Dorian Corey.

Dorian is careful to point out, however, that a read occurs only between two members of the gay world, noting that:

The thought here seems to be that an insult made by a straight person to a drag queen is politically charged in a way insults swapped among queens are not. Among queens, the threat of danger and discrimination is removed.

Here Dorian is giving us definitions of two different actions we can perform using language, and so she actually sounds a lot like a philosopher of language, since this is what we do, too. Philosophers of language (and our neighbors over in the field of linguistics) are interested not only in what words and sentences mean, but also in what people can do with words and sentences. We are alert to the fact that when people communicate, what matters is not only what the words mean, but also many other things, like the identity of the speaker, the speaker’s intentions, how she says the words, when and where she says them and to whom they’re said. The overall meaning of an utterance, when we consider all of these factors, can be quite different from the meaning of the specific words that were used.

For example, outside of Drag Race , if someone tells you to “sashay away,” you will likely interpret them as telling you (in a pretty fancy way) to go away. However, if you’re a queen on the stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race , and RuPaul herself tells you to “sashay away,” you won’t just interpret her as telling you to go away; you’ll interpret her as eliminating you from the competition. When these words are uttered by a particular person in a particular context, they take on a special meaning. This shows that to work out what kind of communication has taken place, we need to look at more than just the meaning of the words that were spoken.

The theory of how we perform different actions using speech is known (unimaginatively) as speech act theory , and it is associ ated with the philosophers J.L. Austin and John Searle. Austin and Searle tried to produce lists of all the different “speech acts” we can perform, from promising to requesting to ordering to praising. As part of this task, they had to come up with definitions for all of these different acts, and they had to specify different rules for each one.

Speech acts are all governed by rules. There are rules you must follow to successfully promise someone something, for example, and those rules are different from the rules you must follow if you want to successfully order someone to do something. You may not realize it, but you actually know hundreds of different linguistic rules like this, and you follow them automatically and unthinkingly every day of your life.

Yet it’s one thing to know how to do something, and quite another to be able to spell out the rules explicitly. Kim Chi can beat her face for the gods, for example, but if you asked her to write out a list of precise rules for how to do that, she might struggle. Similarly, when Austin and Searle tried to spell out precise rules for different speech acts, they found that it was actually pretty difficult.

Sometimes there are rules governing what kind of language is required to perform a certain act. For example, if you want to compliment a queen’s drag, you should use ‘she/her’ pronouns (and this can be non-negotiable if the queen is trans). If you refer to her as ‘him’ you’re undermining her femininity. There can also be rules specifying contexts or situations a speech act must be performed in for it to be successful. For example, in the UK you can’t perform the speech act of pronouncing two people married unless you’re in a venue with a wedding license. (Often these rules are given to us by law, or by political or religious norms.)

And sometimes the rules specify who has the right to perform the speech act in question. For example, only people who have been ordained (like RuPaul and Michelle Visage) can perform the speech act of pronouncing people married. Only RuPaul and no one else can perform the act of eliminating a queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race by telling her to “sashay away,” and only drag queens can read other queens, at least according to Dorian Corey.

No shade towards philosophers, but categorizing different speech acts and working out their rules may seem like a pretty abstract and pointless pursuit. Yet it does have some important real-world implications. It turns out it can really matter what kind of speech act a person has performed. A parent might shout at her child, “That wasn’t a request, it was an order!” and an upset friend might cry, “I want a proper apology!” Several queens from Drag Race who’ve been accused of making offensive remarks (like Bianca and Trixie) have tried to assure fans that “It was just a joke!” All of these cases involve disputes about what speech act has been performed. Such disputes occur in the legal system all the time, too. For example, defamation, slander, and libel are all speech acts and they each have different punishments, so it’s important that the court correctly identifies which speech act, if any, the defendant performed.

Working out what speech act has been performed matters to the queens when they’re on the show, too. “No tea, no shade (no pink lemonade),” as popularized by Jasmine Masters, is a phrase often used by queens to make it clear that their remarks aren’t intended to be shady or insulting. They use it to say, “I am not performing the speech act of throwing shade at you right now.”

I’ve just smuggled in the idea that throwing shade is a speech act. I think reading is a speech act, too. Lamentably, Austin and Searle didn’t analyze these particular acts, but that’s not to say they didn’t engage in them; Austin was particularly fond of throwing shade, notorious as he was among his fellow Oxford academics for his cutting wit.

We can now take up the challenge of showing that throwing shade and reading are legitimate categories of speech act. To do this, we need to come up with clear definitions for each act, and do for throwing shade and reading what Austin and Searle did for less exciting speech acts like promising and asserting. Dorian Corey has already laid some useful foundations, and we now need to expand upon them. Once we’ve worked out out exactly what these acts involve and how they differ from one another, we should be able to better appreciate the work that goes into a good read or bit of shade, and we will hopefully gain a better understanding of the important social and psychological functions these acts fulfill for the drag community, too.

You’re perfect, you’re beautiful, you look like Linda Evangelista, you’re a model! Everything about you is perfect! Did you stone those tights? Oh, you’re smiling! They eat her up every single time she’s on that damned stage! She could walk out there in a fucking diaper and they’d be like, “Valentina! Your smile is beautiful!”

We can now use these examples, as well as Dorian Corey’s definitions and some concepts from philosophy, to spell out exactly what the difference is between reading and throwing shade. In the process, we should arrive at clear definitions of the two acts. Here are three differences between them.

To read a queen, you need to say it to her face. She has to hear you say it. But to shade a queen, you can do it in her presence, or you can wait until a cutaway interview, or a quiet moment with other queens in Untucked , or you can even post a sub-tweet (Raven’s 2016 “FUCK! YO! PURSE!”, about Bob the Drag Queen, comes to mind).

In philosophical terms, reading requires something called “uptake” by the target of the read herself (and not just bystanders). If your target hears you and understands what you intended to communicate, you’ve got uptake. Lots of speech acts require direct uptake by the target to be successful. If I attempt to make a promise to you, but you don’t hear me, or you don’t understand me, I haven’t really made a promise—for the promise to occur, we both have to know about it. It doesn’t matter whether other people heard me—you in particular, as my intended target, have to hear it.

If a queen tries to read a fellow queen, but that fellow queen doesn’t hear or understand it, it’s not really a read, because there was no uptake from the target. The whole idea of a read is that it’s an upfront, in-your-face insult. When the queen being targeted doesn’t understand the read, the insult it contains ceases to be upfront and in your face. Instead, it becomes less direct—something the queen has to think about for a moment to work out. This means it becomes shade instead. Throwing shade doesn’t require uptake by the targeted queen. She doesn’t need to hear or understand it, hence why a lot of shade happens in the confessionals. In fact, that queen need never find out you did it. You can even throw shade at a dead person. But you most definitely can’t read a dead person (unless they’re only Morgan McMichaels–level dead).

The insult contained in a read is more direct than the insults involved in throwing shade. When you read someone, your judgment of them is explicit. You confront them directly, and you tell them, often in blunt and uncompromising terms, what you think is wrong with them, as when Latrice tells Phi Phi she’s an “illiterate fuck.”

When you throw shade, your judgment is less obvious. Ginger Minj doesn’t tell Max to her face that she thinks she’s unfairly getting by “doing the same shit” every week; instead she asks another queen how she feels about it, all the while knowing that Max is in earshot.

Reading and throwing shade are therefore good ways to illustrate the difference between what philosophers call at-issue and not at-issue content. At-issue content is what the speaker directly communicates. So when Jujubee tells Tyra Sanchez, “Your grill is fucked up,” the at-issue content is the claim that Tyra’s grill is fucked up. Reads are simple—their insulting message is the main, at-issue content.

In contrast, when one queen shades another queen, the original comment is often not directly insulting—in other words, the insult is not built into the at-issue content. Rather, it’s what philosophers would call not at-issue ; it’s smuggled in, sneakily, as a subtle implication, or a hidden presumption, which we as an audience have to work out. This is what Dorian Corey’s talking about when she says you can throw shade by not telling someone something. Telling a queen she’s ugly is too obvious to count as shade. It is shadier to not tell her, and let her work out for herself what you really think.

So when Bianca says to Adore, “What’s your name again?” the utterance, on the surface, doesn’t look that bad. There’s no insult in the at-issue content; it’s just a question about Adore’s name. But the insult is still there—by asking the question, Bianca is implying or insinuating that Adore is forgettable.

Philosophers have identified several different mechanisms that facilitate this kind of sneaky communication, including things called “implicatures” and “presuppositions,” which are less direct than simple statements of fact. We often use these mechanisms when we want to be polite. For example, if someone asks you on a date tomorrow, you might say, “I have to watch Drag Race tomorrow,” which implies that you can’t come. This feels less harsh than saying, “No, I don’t want to go on a date with you.”

Because the speech act of throwing shade uses these kinds of mechanisms, it’s sneakier and less confrontational than a read, and so it has a level of plausible deniability. A shady queen can always pull it back and say, “That’s not what I meant!” and accuse her audience of misinterpreting her. Whereas when, like Latrice, you call someone an “illiterate fuck,” there’s nowhere you can hide. (Though as the editors point out, Latrice will always have a hard time hiding.)

A queen reading another queen often intends to make people laugh, whilst a queen throwing shade doesn’t need this intention. In more technical terms, the reading queen intends to produce different perlocutionary effects , different psychological effects on her listeners, from the queen throwing shade. Sometimes these effects won’t be achieved (when the read is just not funny, for example), but it’s the intention that matters.

Both reading and throwing shade involve insulting the target, either directly or indirectly. In all the reads above, the queens are insulted—Tyra has bad teeth, Phi Phi O’Hara can’t read, Adore is dumb and unfashionable, and Violet is dim. The same is true of all of the examples of shade—Phi Phi is ugly, Valentina is the judge’s pet, Max is boring, Gia is an attention-whore, and Adore is forgettable.

However, causing offense is rarely a queen’s primary intention when she reads someone. In fact, during The Library , the person wearing the glasses usually has one major goal—to be funny. She likely wants to make both the target, and all bystanders, laugh, and that’s why The Library is such a well-loved challenge. Dorian Corey was wise to this distinction when she specified that to get a good read going, everyone (including the target of the read) has to laugh and kiki.

When throwing shade, in contrast, queens aren’t so hung up on making anyone laugh; they’re usually kind of pissed off, or being competitive, and want to upset the target or make others think less of her. When Ginger Minj shades Max and Pearl, she does so because she is genuinely frustrated by what she perceives as the easy ride these two queens are having in the competition. And Farrah shades Gia because she’s getting fed up with what she perceives as Gia’s bullying attitude towards her, and wants to get her own back with an equally hurtful remark. Shade can definitely be funny, but this often isn’t the primary goal of the queen who’s throwing it.

So there we have it. Reads require uptake (recognition by the target), they’re direct, and they’re intended to be funny. Shade doesn’t require uptake, it’s indirect, and being funny isn’t the primary goal. Both speech acts are forms of insult, but they’re very different from each other.

Yet reads and shade are not the only ways queens can critique each other. There’s actually a third category of insult, because if the queen has no intention to be funny, then she isn’t really reading, but if she’s being pretty direct, then she’s not throwing shade, either. In fact, she’s probably just flat out coming for the other queen.

When Sharon Needles calls Phi Phi O’Hara a “tired-ass showgirl” and Phi Phi responds with “At least I am a showgirl, bitch! Go back to Party City where you belong,” the queens are not reading each other. Nor are they throwing shade, since their digs are hardly subtle. This is just a basic cat fight.

The same is true of Alyssa Edwards telling Coco Montrese, “Girl, look how orange you fucking look,” or Jade Jolie telling Alyssa, “Girl, you have rolls all over the place in the back. It was disgusting” (both from Season Five). In both cases, the speaker isn’t trying to make anyone laugh, so these aren’t reads, but they’re not trying to be sneaky, so these aren’t shade. As RuPaul once tweeted, “Throwing shade takes a bit of creativity, being a bitch takes none.” Being bitchy is a different kind of action, one that seems less theatrical and more visceral.

Time out, hold up. Hold up, sweetheart. Let’s get it together before you wanna read. I don’t have a sugar daddy, sweetheart. Everything that I’ve had, I’ve worked for, and I worked for to get and I’ve built myself. So you need to know that one hundred percent. I don’t have a sugar daddy, I’ve never had a sugar daddy. If I wanted a sugar daddy, yes, I probably can go out and get one, because I AM WHAT? SICKENING. You could never have a sugar daddy because you are NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL. Baby, everything I’ve had I worked for, and I’ve gotten myself. I built myself from the ground up, FUCKING BITCH!

Shangela is not reading Mimi Imfurst here; this kind of rant wouldn’t happen in The Library . Sure, it’s funny to us, but that’s not Shangie’s main intention; she’s actually pretty furious (and later throws her drink). But this isn’t shade either, since Shangela is literally shouting it into Mimi’s face. In fact, it’s the opposite—Shangela’s out here dragging Mimi in the blazing sun.

It’s very easy to say that a good read must be funny, but it’s not so easy to explain what makes a read funny. Unfortunately, to paraphrase E.B. White, analyzing humor is a bit like dissecting a frog—the innards are boring and the frog dies. Nonetheless, if we are to get to the heart of what makes for a good read, we need to delve into some theories of humor.

Philosophers haven’t said a great deal about this topic, but what they have said has been quite negative. For example, many ancient philosophers thought laughing, the characteristic response to finding something humorous, is closely intertwined with feelings of superiority. Plato thought that laughter involves taking delight in another person’s ignorance about how they really are. Aristotle was a little more positive about humor than Plato, but he agreed that “a jest is a kind of mockery,” and suggested that what he called mockery and jesting could be banned. (Cheerful guys, the Greeks.) On this picture, then, humor and malevolence go hand in hand, and things are humorous if they give us a chance to take pleasure in someone else’s delusions or flaws.

We see an element of truth in this idea when it comes to reads; when Latrice calls Phi Phi ignorant, perhaps we laugh because we’re taking delight in the thought that Phi Phi thinks she’s smarter than she really is. However, this theory also has some major problems. If finding something funny involves feelings of superiority, why does the queen who has just been read for filth often also laugh? The read is at her expense, so to whom can she feel superior? The theory seems too narrow to account for the wide variety of people and things we find funny.

A better theory of humor is known as the incongruity theory. This holds that we find something funny if it’s incongruous and something we don’t expect. This could explain why BenDeLa’s read of Shangela at the beginning of the chapter is so funny; we expect her to finish by acknowledging the ways Shangela has improved, but she doesn’t, and that catches us (including Shangela) off guard. This is also why we find Bianca Del Rio’s read of Adore so amusing. When Bianca says, “I know what you got on your SATs,” we expect her to tell us a score—not to point to something Adore spilled on the exam paper. Kant seems to have had a similar idea of humor in mind when he wrote that “laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”

Yet this theory isn’t perfect, either. Sometimes we find a read funny even when it isn’t incongruous; Jessica Wild once read a queen simply by saying, “You are so fat” (Season Two). Other times, we laugh just because of the clever wordplay—remember Latrice Royale’s read of Jiggly Caliente: “BMW—Body Made Wrong” (Season Four).

The theory of humor that can best explain the power of a good read recognizes that humor and laughter are ways of relieving tension. While Plato and Aristotle may have been wrong to think that finding something funny always involves feeling superior, they were on to something when they noticed that humor has a dark side. Reads, after all, involve negative judgements. We might initially find the idea of someone laughing at a comment telling them they’re stupid, or fat, or have bad teeth, a little weird, but it does make sense if we conceive of laughter as a kind of catharsis, or release.

We find something funny if we recognize that in another situation, it might be distressing, but in this one, it’s harmless. So something is funny if it presents as threatening and non-threatening at the same time; we perceive the threat and feel nervous energy, but then we recognize that the threat isn’t real and we can release that nervous energy, often by laughing. This might explain the laughter that typically accompanies the Library challenge. The content of a read can be quite cruel, but because it is delivered in a non-threatening way, the target and the onlookers are able to release tension. Dorian Corey noticed this when she said that a good read finds a flaw and exaggerates it.

The catharsis of humor takes on a special importance for the queens on Drag Race , many of whom will have faced considerable abuse for their sexuality, their race, and their gender identity throughout their lives. Numerous queens have shared their stories of body confidence issues, eating disorders, mental health problems, financial problems and ostracization by friends, families and communities. You might initially expect that these queens would dread The Library , because no one wants to be reminded of their insecurities and flaws. And some do find the experience upsetting—Alexis Michelle in Season Nine was uncomfortable about her weight, for example, and was hurt when she was on the receiving end of body-shaming reads in the challenge.

Yet most reads are nothing like a slur shouted at a queen by an ordinary person on the street, as Dorian points out, and queens mostly take them in good spirits. When given by one queen to another, a read is often stripped of malice, and the queens relish the opportunity to laugh about something that may, outside the workroom, be a source of anxiety.

A good read, then, is one that can create a valuable opportunity for queens to release nervous energy and tension. Sometimes there’s tension because of a big build up, and sometimes there’s tension because the reader’s hitting on a nerve, but most of the time, a good read offers a rare opportunity for queens to confront their insecurities in a safe and light-hearted way.

Every community has distinctive ways of communicating, and RuPaul’s Drag Race has taught the world about the unique conversation styles of drag queens. Yet while reads and shade may be funny to viewers, they also fulfill useful functions—they’re cathartic, they’re a respite from the hateful world outside of drag, and they enable the queens to feel part of a community.

In philosophy, as well as in other related fields like linguistics and anthropology, academics have become increasingly attentive to the social and political power of language. One community and its communication styles has come under particular focus, and the lessons we learned about this community are also relevant to the drag world. It’s time for a quick herstorical detour.

In 1950s Britain, gay men spoke an entirely different language. This language was Polari, and it had been popularized by those in the theater, circus workers, Merchant Navy sailors, and sex workers, as well as by David Bowie (check out his song “Girl Loves Me”). You may recognize some words from Polari: naff , originally meaning tacky or inferior, is still commonly used by Brits, and zhoosh , meaning to smarten up, still pops up on shows like Queer Eye . Some argue that the word camp itself also has roots in Polari. Yet you probably can’t understand “How bona to vada your dolly old eek!” (Translation: “Nice to see you!”)

Nowadays, few people speak Polari, but in the first half of the twentieth century, it had many important functions. Firstly, it enabled gay men to discuss their lives openly without making themselves vulnerable to exposure and violence, at a time when homophobia was rife and homosexuality a crime so serious that if caught, you could lose your job, go to prison, or be chemically castrated. Secondly, it enabled them to identify each other in a relatively safe way—you just needed to drop a single Polari word into an otherwise ordinary English sentence, and wait to see if the hearer spotted it.

Thirdly, it enabled them to poke fun at oppressive forces in society, without fear of retaliation—they mocked the police, for example, by naming them Hilda Handcuffs or Jennifer Justice . Fourthly, and finally, it enabled them to name and refer to things that ordinary, heteronormative English couldn’t accommodate. For example, queens on Drag Race are using a Polari term when they call certain men rough trade , which means a typically very masculine, working class or blue-collar gay man (remember Kameron Michaels in her Trade cologne advert in Season Ten?). Because of these many functions, Polari helped reinforce solidarity among gay men.

So why am I talking about a dying language from Britain? Nowadays, secret languages like Polari aren’t needed quite so much, though that’s not to say that in this day and age it’s no longer dangerous to be an out LGBTQ+ person. Yet laws are gradually getting better, and the Internet has made it easier to find like-minded people without making yourself vulnerable to homophobic attack. However, even if it’s less needed nowadays, Polari is still a dramatic example of the power of language. We all know that language helps us share ideas, but Polari showed us how language can also help people form bonds, protect themselves from violence, and develop strong senses of identity.

Drag queens don’t speak an entirely different language, but they definitely have a distinctive way of communicating with each other, and these communication methods seem to serve some of the same functions Polari served back in the 1950s. I haven’t explored in any depth the new vocabulary that Drag Race has introduced, which has enabled queens to be incredibly articulate about their experiences, but I hope to have shown how reading in particular can provide an important opportunity for catharsis among the queens on the show. I hope I’ve also shown that drag queens have carved out for themselves a unique way of communicating, capable of many nuances. Their communicative style is borne of a creative fusion of LGBTQ+ slang and the vernaculars of the African American and Latinx queens who spearheaded the early drag scene in Harlem, New York. This style continues to change with the times—every season we pick up new words and catch-phrases, as the queens continue to innovate.

We’ve looked at some of the innovative ways the queens of Drag Race communicate. This raises some interesting and important questions about whether it’s okay for those outside of drag or LGBTQ+ communities to appropriate or imitate the way the queens speak. Can fans who aren’t also queens use the queens’ vocabulary or indulge in the act of reading? Appropriation can, after all, be quite harmful: it can be exploitative (by profiting from the work of minorities and not compensating them for it), it can be derogatory (by perpetuating two-dimensional stereotypes of minority communities) and it can damage the bonds of solidarity that have been forged in minority groups over time through the possession of distinctive, shared culture. Yet it can also lead to more acceptance and visibility for minority communities, normalizing ways of being that were previously considered shameful. There’s a fine line between appreciation and appropriation, and I’ll leave it an open question as to how and where we draw it.

The main takeaway of this chapter is that the queens of Drag Race are innovators not only when it comes to style, make-up and performance, but also when it comes to language. Reading and throwing shade are distinctive speech acts, which have not yet been analyzed by philosophers or linguists, and they enable the queens to insult each other in many different, amusing, and creative ways. The queens have developed a complex and multifaceted way of communicating and this makes watching RuPaul’s Drag Race all the more enjoyable. They are, as Michelle Visage would say, “real elo-guent.”