part0012

W ith these words, RuPaul typically announces the “reading” challenge, a mini-challenge that has been a part of every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race since its first occurrence in Season Two, as well as RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars .

In the reading challenge, the queens take turns “reading” each of the other queens, cracking jokes that poke fun at their supposed flaws, weaknesses, or peculiarities. The challenge has become one of the most anticipated parts of the show, and the practice of reading is an important tradition not just in Drag Race but for queer and drag culture more generally—which is what RuPaul refers to when she affirms that “reading is fundamental.”

But it is also one that raises interesting ethical questions. “Reads” are inevitably meant to induce laughter at the expense of others, sometimes severely so. In the first ever reading challenge on Season Two, Jujubee warned the others: “I will read ya to filth!” Reads frequently involve making fun of physical appearances or invoking stereotypes. Does this make the practice morally problematic? Is it sometimes wrong to read someone, or to laugh when someone is “being read”?

This question has been raised on the show itself. During the Season Nine reading challenge, Alexis Michelle was visibly displeased with the multiple reads about her weight, including Nina Bo’Nina Brown’s “Alexis, you’re like a BMW: Body Made Wrong”; Valentina’s “Alexis Michelle, you are oh so Broadway , but you’re also very broad”; and Farrah Moan’s “Alexis Michelle, Pillsbury called, they want their rolls back.” Alexis later explained in a walk-through with Ru that she considered these jokes to be inappropriate as the queens were aware of her struggles with body image.

Other Season Nine queens and RuPaul herself objected to Alexis’s complaints, arguing that the whole point of reading is that nothing is off-limits. Indeed, some of the most popular queens in Drag Race herstory have been particularly ruthless readers, such as Bianca Del Rio, who proudly refers to her ability to find and exploit someone’s weak spot as her “rolodex of hate.”

As the show’s reach continues to expand, should Drag Race continue to “teach the children” the art of reading and throwing shade? Is Alexis Michelle right that there are moral limits to reads, or does Bianca Del Rio understand correctly that the whole point of reading is that it should not respect strict boundaries of civility and moral sensibilities?

Let’s start by asking ourselves: what does it mean to read someone, precisely? It obviously refers back to the idea of reading as the decoding and comprehension of, typically but not exclusively visual, symbols. The term refers to reading someone rather than something, “like a book,” and implies seeing through the façade that someone puts up (their book cover, if you will), having a clear view of them and their flaws. Reading someone is to expose these flaws, in a funny and clever way, often exaggerating or elaborating on them. This idea was invoked by Alyssa Edwards when she told Ivy Winters in Season Five’s reading challenge: “Reading you is like reading a Walt Disney book; it’s simply too easy.” If reading is taken to a particular level of brutality or eloquence, this can be referred to as “reading for (or to) filth.”

A read typically involves a three-way relationship between the “reader” (the person making the joke), the person “being read” (in other words, the butt of the joke) and the audience. Of course, as Trinity K. Bonet, Bob the Drag Queen, and Shangela proved in the reading challenges on Season Six, Season Eight, and All Stars 3 , respectively, you can also read yourself, in which case the reader and the butt of the read become the same person. Moreover, reading can take place without an “external” audience, in other words with only the reader and the butt of the read present. Typically, however, reading is done as much for the entertainment of third parties as for addressing the person directly.

On Drag Race , reading is by no means limited to the mini-challenge. Sometimes RuPaul asks contestants to read each other at other moments, for instance on the “Reunion” episodes broadcast just before the finale. Untucked , the backstage after-show, basically consists of the queens reading each other about their performances in the main challenge or their runway looks. And, of course, a lot of the reading between the queens continues beyond their time on the show on social media (sometimes resulting in whole Twitter threads of back-and-forths where multiple queens chime in) and in Drag Race spin-off live shows such as the Haters Roast .

Yet the practice of reading predates Drag Race . The term was first popularized by the 1990 cult documentary Paris Is Burning that RuPaul always mentions when introducing the reading challenge. This documentary is about the ball scene in 1980s New York City and the mostly African-American and Latinx queer communities involved in it. This is where the practice and language of reading probably originated. In the documentary, one of its protagonists, Dorian Corey, helpfully defines reading as “the real art form of insult.”

Corey also explains the relationship and distinction between reading and the act of “throwing shade”: “Shade comes from reading, reading came first. Shade is, ‘I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you because you know you’re ugly’. And that’s shade.” In other words, while there is overlap between them, shade is perhaps more sophisticated than reading. Shade is generally more indirect and subtle, it more typically involves sarcasm, and unlike reading can be expressed non-verbally, or even consist of ignoring someone.

Another important distinction is between reading and “coming for” someone. Coming for someone involves more aggressively calling someone out, and it’s not necessarily funny or clever or meant to induce laughter. The distinction between responding to someone saying “Is that a read?” or “Did you just come for me?” is that the former indicates that the remark is taken in jest, that the intent of the speaker is benevolent, while the latter indicates that it is perceived as an attack.

As a particular type of put-down humor, reading is quite similar to “roasting” (and the related concept of a “burn”), a form of insult comedy, more widely known than reading outside of drag and queer culture, in which a specific invited individual is voluntarily subjected to jokes at their expense. Even on Drag Race itself, these two pop culture phenomena have increasingly blurred together. The “roast” of a particular individual has been a main challenge on three seasons of the show (so far there have been roasts of RuPaul, Michelle Visage, and Lady Bunny), and the challenge is essentially the same as the reading challenge, except for the fact that the queens mainly focus on the roastee rather than their fellow contestants.

Still, the roast derives from American stand-up comedy where jokes typically follow a strict formula of a set-up followed by a punchline. While Drag Race contestants increasingly follow this format in the reading challenge, reading remains more open to playfully insulting jokes in more creative forms and has traditionally more of a back-and-forth dynamic.

While it’s hard to imagine what philosophers who have long been dead would have to say about RuPaul, Drag Race , or the reading challenge, there is reason to believe that few of them would have been big fans. Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of what philosophers have said about humor has been quite negative.

This is because many early philosophers mainly considered humor as an expression of feelings of superiority by those telling jokes over those who are the butt of the joke, and correspondingly laughing as mainly scornful or mocking. Often, in discussing the ethics of humor, their primary concern was the morality of the person involved in the action of joking or laughing rather than the morality of the action itself. Such an approach to moral philosophy is today called “virtue ethics” as it generally emphasizes concepts such as “character” and “virtue” and traces its roots back to Ancient Greece.

Writing in the fourth century B.C., Plato, for instance, who saw eudaimonia (which can be translated as “well-being” or “happiness”) as the ultimate aim of ethics and the arête , or virtues, as the necessary skills or dispositions to attain this, considered laughter at comedies—which were a popular form of entertainment in his time—to be a form of malice or sadism. In Philebus , Plato argued that, by laughing at people who are presented as ignorant in some respects, because they consider themselves better (more wealthy, more beautiful, more virtuous) than they actually are, we take pleasure in something vicious, which is itself malicious and cowardly. He therefore believed that comedy should be tightly controlled in the ideal state, in order to ensure the virtuous life of both the individual and the state as a whole—which he thought were analogous.

With their emphasis on the connection between humor and feelings of superiority, ancient Greek philosophers laid the groundwork of what today is referred to as the “superiority theory of humor.” But this theory’s most prominent defender lived two millennia later. Thomas Hobbes, who is today mainly known as a political philosopher for his defense of absolute sovereign authority and not usually considered a virtue theorist (even though his description of human character traits and “passions” is clearly evaluative), warned that joking at the expense of others not only reflects the vice of mean-spiritedness, but also fosters it in ourselves and others.

Hobbes characterized laughter as usually the result of the innately competitive, individualistic nature of humans who experience what he called a “sudden glory” at the realization of others’ inferiority. He believed such a response to be problematic because it is a sign of small-mindedness. As he explains in his 1651 book Leviathan (Part 1

Chapter 2 ), scornful laughter occurs mostly in those who are “conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves” and “are forced to keep themselves in their own favor by observing the imperfections of other men.” By contrast, one of the proper works of a great mind is to “help and free others from scorn, and to compare itself only with the most able.”

While the superiority theory of humor is often criticized by pointing out that many instances of humor do not rely on feelings or expressions of superiority, the worries put forth by these philosophers do seem particularly applicable to the sort of put-down humor that reading involves. Pointing out another’s flaws is often a way of showcasing your own flaw-lessness, or at least making yourself look better by comparison. As Dorian Corey explains, pointing out a flaw in someone that you yourself share is not a read but “just a fact”: “when you are all of the same thing you have to go to the fine point.” Reading thus inevitably involves proclaiming someone inferior in some respect.

Ancient Greek virtue ethicists had another worry that specifically applied to those laughing at jokes. Such laughter, they thought, is something that overpowers you and signifies a problematic loss of self-control. The Stoics, a school of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that greatly valued rational self-control, thought it was constantly threatened with being overridden by emotions such as fear, envy, passionate love, or, indeed, loud, frequent or uncontrolled laughter. The followers of Stoic philosopher Epictetus admiringly claimed that he had never laughed at all. For the same reason, Plato believed that the ruling classes in the ideal state should avoid laughing at all times.

In the context of Drag Race , uncontrollable laughter is considered a sign of a successful read, if anything. Winning readers are frequently rewarded with shrieks and knee-slaps by their fellow queens, and Katya’s read of Roxxxy Andrews on All Stars 2 (“I think about you all the time—especially in the morning, at the bus stop”) famously knocked Alaska off her feet.

Moral philosophies that are concerned mainly with a person’s moral character have become much less influential since the ancient Greeks. A more common way of judging whether something is morally acceptable or not is by looking not at the person but rather at their actions themselves.

Such actions may be good or bad in themselves, as “deonto-logical ethics,” with its focus on general rules and duties, insists. While the generally negative assessment of humor throughout the history of philosophy might suggest otherwise, there has not actually been much analysis of the ethics of humor from a deontological perspective. This might be because it’s intuitively implausible that humor is either categorically good or categorically bad. Immanuel Kant, probably the best-known deontological philosopher, was fairly ambivalent about humor in his 1790 Critique of Judgment , recognizing the physical pleasure derived from it but denying there was any intellectual benefit to be had, that humor or laughter contribute anything to our reason or moral sense.

By contrast, moral theories that evaluate such actions specifically by the outcomes (or consequences) they lead to fall under the header of “consequentialist ethics.” From a consequentialist standpoint, the morally right thing to do in any situation is the action that produces the best kind of overall outcome. Whether or not philosophers are strictly considered “consequentialists” in their moral outlook, many of the negative things that philosophers have said about humor focus on the variety of potentially bad outcomes or consequences of humor.

Most obviously, joking may have negative psychological consequences for the individual being joked about. It may cause offense, embarrassment, shock, disgust, and the feeling of being demeaned or insulted. But what does it mean to be offended by a joke, and what accounts for its badness? Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher not usually counted among the consequentialists but whose ethics was based around a consequentialist-friendly notion of compassion and the need to alleviate suffering in others, explains the offensiveness of being laughed at or ridiculed as stemming from the fact that it painfully reveals a great incongruity between our conceptions and the objective realities. In his 1819 main work The World as Will and Representation (Chapter VIII, “On the theory of the ludicrous”), he writes that “the laugh of scorn announces with triumph to the baffled adversary how incongruous were the conceptions he cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself to him.”

In other words, what often hurts about offensive jokes is that they point out that we are worse in some respect than we previously thought we were. This certainly seems relevant for the practice of reading, which is often a way of demonstrating that you have “clocked” a flaw that a queen was either unaware of or which she thought she was getting away with.

But offense or shock may also come about through jokes that make light of serious situations. Jokes that trivialize serious matters may be problematic because they cause emotional hurt to victims of tragedies, increasing the suffering of those already in pain. Moreover, contemporary philosopher John Morreall argues that humor can be objectionable when it treats as a subject for play something that should be taken seriously, blocking compassion and responsible action.

Again, examples of reads that may cross a line in this regard are easy to find. Katya’s All Stars 2 read that made Alaska fall on the floor made light of Roxxxy Andrews’s childhood trauma of being abandoned at a bus stop by her mother at three years old, which she had revealed on her original season in an emotional breakdown that left her bawling on the main stage. Sasha Velour was upset when Eureka joked about eating disorders in a read directed at Valentina, biting back with the now memefied “don’t joke about that!” A social media firestorm followed reads by Bianca Del Rio (not made on Drag Race itself) making fun of Blair St. Clair’s disclosure on the show that she had experienced rape.

A last and far more recent worry, raised by philosophers such as Ronald De Sousa and Merrie Bergmann and focusing specifically on racist and sexist humor, is that these types of humor lead to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes, by inculcating, spreading, or reinforcing negative attitudes about those individuals or groups that are the butt of the joke. Such attitudes might directly or indirectly cause harm to those about whom the attitudes are held. Note that such jokes may be problematic not only for their consequences, as consequentialist ethicists would be most concerned with, but also because they expose a defect in the person telling or laughing at the joke (they may, for instance, expose her as a racist), which brings us back to the concerns of virtue ethicists.

Indeed, the practice of reading has many ostensibly problematic features as seen from this perspective, as reads frequently turn on racial (black, Latinx, and Asian queens have been subjected to such reads) or gendered/sexual stereotypes (for instance, Bianco Del Rio’s “Joslyn Fox is so gay even her asshole has a lisp”), or make fun of physical attributes such as body size (the reads about queens like Darienne Lake or Eureka O’Hara) or disabilities (the reads about Kennedy Davenport’s lazy eye).

At this point, you might be put off by the negative portrayal of something as universally loved as a joke, and as a Drag Race fan might feel judged for enjoying a show that so centrally involves put-down humor in the form of reading. You would be forgiven for thinking that philosophers are humorless killjoys unable to appreciate one of the things that make life truly enjoyable. In modern society, humor and laughing are considered by most people to be among the most important joys in life, and a sense of humor is widely regarded as one of the most important traits in a friend or romantic partner. Indeed, humor is probably a far more immediately positive concept to many people than the abstract notions around which so much of moral philosophy is centered, such as “justice” or the “good life.” So surely humor, even the insult variety of reading, can’t be all bad?

Although virtue ethicist Aristotle agreed with Plato that some forms of jest and mockery may need to be forbidden by lawmakers to avoid their deleterious effects, he also had more positive things to say about it. In fact, in Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV, Chapter 8 ) Aristotle did include amusement and humor among the elements needed for the good life. He believed all virtues to constitute the golden mean between two vices, the two extremes of excess and deficiency. In the case of humor, this meant avoiding those “vulgar buffoons” who “carry humor to its excess,” but also those he considered “boorish and unpolished,” who can “neither make a joke themselves nor put up with those who do.” The virtue of eutrapelia , usually translated as wittiness, from the Greek for “turning well,” for Aristotle meant engaging in humor at the right time and place, and to the right degree.

From a perspective that focuses not on the virtue or vice inherent in humor but rather on its consequences, humor can also be seen in a more positive light. It may sound too obvious to mention, but humor and laughing bring joy, pleasure, and relaxation. The fact that reading is one of the most popular moments in any season of Drag Race and YouTube videos in which the reading challenges are cut together receive millions of views is a testament to this. This popularity is almost self-explanatory: reading makes people laugh, and people love laughing.

But there are other benefits to the kind of put-down humor that reading falls under than just the provision of entertainment. One is that humor is an outlet for the release of pent-up nervous energy. The so-called “relief theory of humor,” which came up as an alternative explanation to the superiority theory in the eighteenth century and was developed in the writings of Herbert Spencer (The Physiology of Laughter ) and Sigmund Freud (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious ), emphasized that laughter is the release of psychic energy used for repressing certain emotions inside ourselves, particularly those that are considered taboo. According to Freud, sexual desire and hostility are among the most widely repressed emotions, which explains why so many jokes are about sex or are letting out hostility we feel towards certain individuals or groups but that we usually repress. While relief theory is explanatory rather than evaluative, meaning it tries to explain why we make (and laugh at) jokes rather than morally evaluate this practice, it does point to some potential benefits.

Reads that joke about serious matters, including Katya’s “bus stop” read of Roxxxy Andrews mentioned earlier, can be a way of dealing with the anxiety that a topic induces rather than trivializing it. A similar thing can be said about stereotype reads. It seems unconvincing to argue, as Ronald De Sousa does in a 1987 essay titled “When Is It Wrong to Laugh?”, that knowing a stereotype and finding a joke based on it funny necessarily implies endorsing the stereotype. Especially when negative stereotypes are self-directed, such as when a big queen makes a joke about being fat, or queens trade reads that turn on gay stereotypes, it’s often a way of dealing with self-doubt and precisely of diffusing these stereotypes rather than reinforcing them.

These benefits are not only found on the individual level, the relief function of humor also has a social dimension. In Laughter , probably the first book-length philosophical work on humor, published in 1900, Henri Bergson broke with those thinkers who considered scornful humor morally suspicious and defended derisive laughter as an appropriate social corrective. “By laughter,” Bergson writes, “society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it.” Contemporary philosophers such as Ted Cohen (Jokes ) and John Morreall (Taking Laughter Seriously ) have similarly defended humor as a social lubricant, as a mechanism to reduce defensiveness, defuse conflict and tension and engender trust.

In this light, we could argue that the practice of reading allows the airing of criticism in a light-hearted way that avoids painful confrontation and is face-saving for both the reader and the butt of the read. It is telling that despite all the drama and conflict, in each season of Drag Race the queens develop a sense of “sisterhood” that is a rarity in the world of reality TV shows.

These and other benefits come out most clearly in the most recent addition to philosophical theories of humor, the so-called “play theory of humor.” This theory derives from observations of the role of mock-aggression among apes and other nonhuman animals.

Considering the similarity between the laughter of human babies and that of chimps during tickling, Max Eastman observed in his 1936 work Enjoyment of Laughter that “we come into the world endowed with an instinctive tendency to laugh and have this feeling in response to pains presented playfully.” The idea of humor as playfully aggressive would explain why young children laugh while wrestling or chasing, learning skills that will later become useful for less humorous purposes in a way that many young nonhuman animals do as well. If playing is a way to exercise your aggressive abilities in a safe setting, humor could be for verbal aggression what sports is for physical aggression.

Play theorists insist that saying something in jest is not the same thing as saying it seriously, and indeed jests are found funny precisely because they could never be said in seriousness without exceeding the bounds of civility or morality. With this play-theoretical lens, we may be better able to flesh out the difference between reading someone on the one hand and “coming for them” on the other. The question “Is that a read?” in response to a shady remark is not just meant as a way of calling out someone for saying something shady, it also seems to be a way of indicating that someone recognizes the dig as playful. The difference between reading and coming for someone is often the difference between humorously providing feedback that can be taken into account in subsequent performances and deliberately trying to knock someone down. Queens ask the question because it helps them determine the intent of the speaker as benevolent or nefarious. The institutionalized recognition of reading precisely allows for a discernible distinction between reading someone and coming for them.

Seeing the reading that drag queens engage in as a form of playful aggression points at further benefits. It may well have been elevated into the artform it is in the drag community, and especially among African-American and Latinx queer subcultures, precisely because these were and are marginalized groups. Reading done between drag queens is playful, but it also serves to hone verbal aggression skills necessary to respond to actual threats from hostile parts of the wider society. Dorian Corey explains in Paris Is Burning how “the art form of insult” is context-specific: “if it’s happening between the gay world and the straight world, it’s not really a read, it’s more of an insult, a vicious slur-fight.”

So where does that leave reading in terms of moral acceptability? While the potential harms of reading must be taken seriously, its many potential benefits suggest that we cannot simply condemn the practice outright. Some contemporary philosophers do follow Plato in thinking you can categorically condemn humor or certain forms of it. Ronald De Sousa for instance holds that jokes involving negative racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes always reflect badly on those who tell or enjoy them. But most philosophers today argue that ethical evaluations of humor must be highly context-sensitive. If this is true, both the benefits and the harms of the read must be weighed and these judgments must be informed not only by facts about the humorist, the audience and the butt of the joke, but also for instance its timing. That the queens are aware of the importance of timing is exemplified by Katya asking “Too soon?” after the Roxxxy bus stop read.

While no precise formula can be specified for calculating the morality of reading, we can nonetheless come up with some guidelines that should be taken into account based on this overview of the philosophy and ethics of humor. First of all, if reading is, as play theorists claim, indeed mock-aggressive play, it is critical that all participants are aware that the activity is not real aggression and can in some basic sense be considered as having consented to it. Smiling and laughing, play theorists point out, is first and foremost a play signal, announcing “this is just for fun, this is not real fighting,” as well as an acceptance of that fact by the other party.

The fact that a whole vocabulary and rituality has developed around the drag practice of reading is helpful in this regard. It is reasonable to say that being a Drag Race participant (and maybe even being a drag queen full stop) implies accepting that being read comes with the territory. By explicitly distinguishing between reading someone and coming for them, and by explicitly announcing the library to be open before reading commences, the practice plays out in a way that makes it clear for all involved that no actual harm is meant.

This also suggests that successful reading requires intimacy, it requires that the people involved know each other well enough to understand each other’s true intentions and, on the other side, to understand how far they can go in their reads with specific queens. This may be why on regular Drag Race seasons the reading challenge comes around the eighth episode, when the queens have typically already formed a tight “sisterhood,” while on the All Stars seasons it has become the opening mini-challenge, the ice breaker among a group of “Rugirls” who already know each other.

The second, related, guideline is to take the timing and audience of reading into account. Even if reads that turn on stereotypes do not require either the reader or those laughing to endorse them, it might still keep the stereotypes in circulation, perpetuate them and have harmful effects. For such effects to be minimized, it is important that reading takes place in a setting in which the equal status of those stereotyped, who are marginalized in wider society, is clearly not in question. Ultimately, the practice of reading is only admirable when it upholds rather than undermines the drag “sisterhood” as a community of equals.

But it might be that, as Drag Race grows as a cultural phenomenon, the bounds of acceptable reading on the show need to become more restricted. As the audience of Drag Race is becoming ever more dominantly white and non-queer, the airing of a certain type of read on TV that used to be acceptable may develop into something more problematic. With this development, a (mis)understanding of reading being acceptable for all to engage in has spread, as evidenced by the negative social media actions of the growing and increasingly toxic Drag Race fandom. Moreover, as the audience increasingly includes teenage girls, reads about body image and the like become more problematic.

The third guideline is that those engaging in the act of reading (or indeed other types of insult comedy) should always remain open to being challenged on the morality of their reads and seriously consider when someone makes clear that they feel genuinely insulted or wronged, and cannot simply dismiss such objections as “language policing.” Now, the idea that humor is wrong merely because it offends seems untenable. We can’t take offense as the final arbiter for a joke’s morality, as feeling insulted is ultimately subjective and may stem from oversensitivity or be otherwise unwarranted. When Alexis Michelle was insulted by the fat jokes that came her way in the reading challenge of Season Nine, other queens pointed out the hypocrisy that she herself made similar appearance-based reads (her read of Shea Couleé was: “You sure are a scene stealer. I guess gnawing on set pieces explains those teeth”). But it might nonetheless be a cue about potential objections. Moreover, causing gratuitous offense without benefits or purely for the reason of causing offense seems problematic.

In making reading an integral part of what is expected of the queens competing for the crown of America’s next drag superstar, Drag Race draws on a long-standing tradition in drag culture. While mainly a mini-challenge, this has become one the show’s most popular, and often funniest, segments. Why, then, would we want to dissect this philosophically, let alone try to evaluate it from a moral perspective? Analyzing humor and its morality may very well undermine precisely what’s good about it. Explaining or challenging a joke is a surefire way of stopping people from laughing. In the words of writer and literary stylist E.B. White, “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

But if philosophers are right to believe that humor, joking, laughter and comedy raise pressing and complex ethical questions, those engaged in or enjoying reading must face these challenges head-on. If what I have suggested is right, it can surely successfully do so. All in all, reading on Drag Race seems to measure up quite well to the three guidelines sketched above.

When reads do cause earnest offense, this often (but not inevitably) means they have missed the mark and risk undermining precisely what is valuable about the practice. Reads may be quite harsh when the person being read can herself laugh at them. Katya’s bus stop read of Roxxxy is one of the ostensibly “meanest” reads of Drag Race herstory, but Roxxxy herself seemed to be heartily laughing along, suggesting that it was acceptable. Potentially more problematic are the many reads turning on negative stereotypes or body shaming, as these effect more than just the read queen but also the wider audience of the read who might share the feature that is being ridiculed (and increasingly so, given the growing and ever younger audience of Drag Race ). In this sense, Sasha Velour may have been right to object to Eureka O’Hara’s reads suggesting Valentina suffered from an eating disorder, not only because of any hurt caused to Valentina but also to others who may be watching. Nonetheless, there may be value in light-hearted reads about serious matters, including racism and body image, as long as they help all involved to better deal with such issues.