part0015

I n the ninth episode of Season Eight, titled “The Realness,” the remaining contestants help make a video to accompany RuPaul’s single of the same name. During the challenge they admire themselves in the mirror while singing such deeply intellectual lyrics as: “If real is what you feel, feelings aren’t real,” “I know what I feel, what I feel is real,” and “Doesn’t really matter if it’s real, only really matters how we feel.”

Even the casual Drag Race fan knows that queens are constantly asked—and constantly claim—to serve all kinds of realness on and off the runway, but the song doesn’t exactly offer a clear definition of what that means in practice within the Ru-verse, which after all is organized around various modes of performance. Is “realness” really just a feeling, even if feelings aren’t real?

When German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his landmark work Being and Time in 1927, he set out to address one of the fundamental questions of philosophy: What does “being” signify? Heidegger took this rather abstract investigation and made it personal through a concept he called Dasein .

Dasein refers to the perception of existence experienced by those of us capable of awareness and reflection on the very nature of existence itself, which Heidegger saw as the most fundamental quality of humanity. He even uses the term Dasein like the name of a person, as a stand-in for all humans, to drive home the notion that this type of consciousness is what defines us. This view rejected what he considered to be artificial distinctions like Descartes’s mind-body or Aristotle’s subject-object divides, which at that point were well established and mostly taken for granted. Heidegger wasn’t there to fit into anyone else’s idea of consciousness; he wanted to shake up the world of philosophy. That’s where Dasein comes in.

Drag Race represents a kind of microcosm of Dasein, in which contestants struggle with being, becoming, and how they are perceived as their “realest” selves across a variety of contexts and degrees of performativity: in and out of drag, on the runway stage and backstage, on the regular episodes of Drag Race and All Stars and on the companion series Untucked , which reveals to audiences “candid” scenes of contestants interacting with each other while they wait for the judges’ verdicts.

There are reams of scholarly essays and studies discussing the meaning of “authenticity,” but we can define it simply as a faithful reconstruction or representation that reflects the true essence of something—or someone—and that is not perceived as an imitation. When referring to individuals, in particular, it is often thought of as the “genuine inner self.”

Heidegger focused his attention on what it means to exist day to day. The “everydayness of Dasein,” he decided, could be reduced to two fundamental matters: who is the self that “maintains itself as an identity throughout changes in behavior and experiences,” and how does the self interact and evolve with the others who occupy the world alongside it? He argued that there is no being without other people, so it would be a mistake to separate the individual from the social and treat them as distinct from one another. For example, the show may not be RuPaul’s Best Friends Race , but there is no getting around the face that queens have to find a way to coexist for the duration of their stay.

Although there is some interaction between the judges and contestants after the runway portion of each episode, most of the social relationships on the show play out in the Werk Room and on episodes of Untucked . Both imply a glimpse at authentic exchanges among queens, but the Werk Room segments are more clearly edited to fit the narrative of a given episode. Dramatic conflict is more likely to break out on Untucked , perhaps due to the heightened emotions of reacting to (and waiting for) the judging process, and because it is the most complicated space on the show, in terms of negotiating how to be in the world and with each other.

Backstage—or, in earlier seasons, in one of the “luxuriously appointed,” sponsored-to-within-an-inch-of-their-life lounges—the contestants are in full drag, but interacting with each other organically. There is no script or skit to follow, and their performance isn’t being formally evaluated. They are inhabiting a limbo state between different aspects of themselves, and the camp and drama of the costumes may spill over into emotionally charged and seemingly exaggerated clashes between queens as they try to navigate those multiple modes of being during potentially long stretches of unstructured time.

Early in Season Three, Shangela and Alexis Mateo speculated that Mariah Paris Balenciaga was very feminine-presenting (“fishy”) even out of drag, and suggested that she might be lying about her gender identity for an unfair advantage in the competition. “You just have very feminine features,” Shangela said suspiciously. In an iconic scene later in that same Untucked episode, the queens were arguing about different styles of drag, with Mimi Imfurst representing a more camp-inspired approach, and some of the others, such as Shangela, insisting that a polished pageant style is more appropriate for a queen aspiring to win Drag Race . The argument escalated rapidly, and finally ended with Shangela tossing her drink at Mimi Imfurst after the latter accused her of having a sugar daddy. The juxtaposition of these two interactions highlights the range of tensions that can emerge within the heightened pressures of the backstage environment.

Some of those tensions are no doubt made worse as a result of the individual and collective baggage accumulated by each of the queens during their journeys to and through Drag Race , which is also a part of Dasein.

“Lunch with RuPaul” is a frequent late-season ritual, where the last remaining contestants get to have a one-on-one conversation with Mama Ru and partake in a single breath mint (a supermodel has to watch her figure, don’t you know). In Season Five, RuPaul asked finalist Jinkx Monsoon about her childhood. “I had no real mother in my house when I was a teenager, because of her alcoholism,” Jinkx explained. That “mature, drag queen from yesteryear character” was her way of making sense of (and peace with) her troubled family history.

She later muses in the Episode Twelve confessional that until her conversation with RuPaul, she’d never realized that this older character emerged “because I never really connected with my childhood.” This is an example of how the show codes “realness” as reflecting more than what happens during the period of filming, pushing hard for contestants to explore—and reveal for audience consumption—their most intimate histories and experiences.

Dasein is a historical project—it’s no accident that the last word in the title of Heidegger’s foundational work is ‘Time’. The true nature of being, he argued, is not just to exist but to evolve. To be is to exist within a context of past, present, and future. Heidegger also thought it important to study and understand the history of philosophical thought on the nature of being (mainly so he could argue that his perspective was extra special; Heidegger was always looking to come for his predecessors).

The passage of time is emphasized throughout Drag Race as well, especially with regard to the queens’ individual journeys. Every season includes some kind of navel-gazing retrospective, usually in several iterations, whether it comes in the form of a clip show like the early seasons, a dedicated reunion episode, or a finale that includes retracing the lead contestants’ growth over the course of the season. RuPaul particularly enjoys asking semifinalists to address photos of themselves as children, presented as miniature but genuine versions of the adults but with little understanding of how to exist in the world, or how to navigate the complex identities they would eventually grow into as full-size drag queens.

The series also frequently adopts a broader historical lens, to contextualize the struggles of women, queer individuals, and civil rights activists from the more or less distant past and into the present. Some examples include an episode dedicated to Pride and the legacy of the Stonewall Riots (Season Four, Episode 6), and the “HERstory of the world” number highlighting strong women all the way back to Eve (All Stars 2 , Episode 3). The accuracy of those historical references is disputable, for example whether Judy Garland’s death really did contribute to the Stonewall riots as RuPaul asserted in Episode 8 of All Stars 4 .

Then again, given that Derrick Barry’s confused surprise that “Nobody was killed?” at Stonewall (based on a 2017 Billboard panel with fellow queens Willam Belli, Manila Luzon, Mariah Balenciaga, and Pandora Boxx) has become a popular Internet meme, maybe a little exaggeration of details is a minor infraction considering the state of queer history knowledge among the intended public.

On the opposite end of the time spectrum, the show regularly claims to be looking for a winner who will represent “the future of drag.” While many contestants come from more traditional drag backgrounds such as pageants or bawdy comedy, Drag Race has crowned winners such as Season Four’s “spooky queen” Sharon Needles, who claimed she expected to be eliminated first given her track record on the pageant circuit. In Season Nine, Sasha Velour’s bald and avant-garde style won the game. This tension between “old-school queens” and those seen to be pushing the boundaries of the art form in new directions is a recurring theme throughout seasons.

All Stars in particular offers queens the opportunity to re-introduce themselves to audiences, or attempt to rehabilitate their image (with mixed results; see: Phi Phi O’Hara, who so abysmally failed her attempted RuDemption in All Stars 2 that she skipped the reunion episode and announced she was quitting drag altogether—a flounce that didn’t stick). It also gives them extra time in front of audiences in which to peel back layers of armor, to reveal themselves more fully and thus more authentically. This induced realness is depicted as a process of becoming, an intrinsic part of Dasein, and according to Heidegger one that is integral to becoming truly free. But what is freedom?

The Season Nine makeover episode was especially memorable because the targets were members of the show’s own production crew, several of whom had been working on the Drag Race set for years. In making the rounds of the Werk Room, RuPaul asked associate director Duncan White what advice he’d offered Sasha Velour, the queen in charge of his makeover. “To try and stay out of your own head,” Duncan said. “We talked about over-intellectualizing things, and that getting in the way of just being free.” RuPaul was intrigued. “How do you do that?” he asked. “Drugs,” came the simple reply.

While less about psychotropic means, Being and Time marked the beginning of Heidegger’s project of rethinking the concept of freedom, defining it as the essence of truth and authenticity. In a sense, Heidegger also valued getting out of one’s own head, although he can hardly have been said to shy away from over-thinking the mundane. If we accept that drag is a means by which many queens achieve their most authentic expression of being in the world and in relation to others, then we can see that within the world of the show, performance is also naturally connected to self-determination and autonomy. This notion of freedom through drag is a pervasive theme on Drag Race .

During the Season Ten reunion episode, some of the queens discussed their often painful histories with religious family members, and their own relationship to spirituality. Monique Heart mentioned how painful she found it to listen to some of those tales given her own background coming from a family of ministers. “But to hear, again,” she said, “the BS that you go through just trying to become your most authentic self, thinking that if I just pray it away or confess this name, like, I’ll finally be free. But to be one hundred percent honest, it wasn’t, it really was not until I put on a wig and a dress and I grabbed that mic …” that she was able to experience a real sense of freedom. This sense of freedom is inextricably linked to the ability to use drag performance for self-expression.

When studying any reality television program, but especially a show about drag queens, it’s impossible to examine the nature of being and the authentic self without also considering the performance aspect. According to the sociologist Erving Goffman, performativity is a means by which humans negotiate the gap between self-perception and the expectations of others within the constraints of society or a particular context.

While the Drag Race competition involves plenty of instances of overt performance, in which contestants enact their drag personas on set or on the runway, the format focuses even more significantly on multiple layers of performativity as the contestants interact with each other, with the audience and producers through “talking head” interviews, and with the judges, giving voice to their self-identity as it emerges in the course of the show. These performances show us how Drag Race competitors try to create an easily recognizable and unique image for themselves to raise their profile and cultivate a fan base for their post-show career.

For some queens, like Gia Gunn or The Vixen, that means that they play the role of the villain who stirs up drama, provokes and throws shade at their peers. Those angling for a Miss Congeniality sash, like Asia O’Hara or BenDeLaCrème, play the role of the benevolent queen who is there for their sisters in need of emotional support.

According to Goffman’s theory, people identify with a diverse set of roles, like being a friend or a parent, and they enact these roles to control the impressions they make on others. In studying these roles, Goffman drew a parallel between everyday behavior and theatrical performances. Just like theater actors on stage, ordinary people are social actors always playing to an audience, real or imagined. Depending on the situation, social actors adopt various characters and strategies to shape how their audiences perceive them. Goffman distinguished between two fundamental concepts: self-expression and self-presentation. He argues that while self-expression encompasses roles that constitute essential parts of one’s identity, self-presentation is associated with roles that serve to achieve certain desired impressions, but are not inherent parts of one’s identity.

People engage in self-expression when they aspire to become members of groups that share similar values and beliefs; self-presentation calls for role-playing and careful, strategic social maneuvering. Successful queens need to be sickening, shocking, and entertaining not just on stage but on social media as well. They need to know how to talk to their audience and differentiate themselves from others. Goffman referred to these behaviors as impression management . Self-expression may be closer to what most of us think of as “realness,” but Goffman’s point is that it can’t be completely disentangled from the more socially aware actions of self-presentation. These are necessary for personal growth and interpersonal relationships.

To successfully compete on the show, Drag Race contestants must engage in both self-expression and self-presentation, as themselves and as their drag personas, always aware at some level of the judges and the audience. When drag queens get stuck in an aesthetic rut, whether it’s BenDeLaCrème’s quirky camp or Thorgy Thor’s clownish looks, audiences and judges grow bored and suspicious over time. A contestant can only survive a label if she shows some versatility: Violet Chachki may be a “look queen” with an unhealthy addiction to corsets, but she was able to pull off a passable Alyssa Edwards impression for Snatch Game.

Drag Race contestants come across as more authentic when they are fresh and even surprising as they proceed from episode to episode during the season, but still recognizable as having some degree of continuity. It’s a difficult balancing act that stretches well beyond what drag performers encounter in their home communities, as many a seasoned queen has discovered to her chagrin.

When building and performing their drag character and in their backstage conduct, Drag Race contestants occupy a shifting middle ground between their “non-drag” and drag identities. They infuse their character’s personality with their own ‘self’, hoping to create a positive impression on RuPaul and the judges through their stage performance and interactions during judging. Drag Race contestants usually demonstrate awareness of both the “self-expressing” and the “self-presentational” ways of being. In fact, drag queens often feel comfortable having many ‘selves’ within them, which further strengthens the personal sense of their authentic self. In Heidegger’s terms, we might say that they are combining the “being-in-the-world” and “being-with” aspects of Dasein in the natural course of their drag practice.

Contestants often talk about their drag personas like fully realized people: BenDeLaCrème describes DeLa as “terminally delightful,” a positive person who helps him cope with some of the darker moments in his own life. Trixie Mattel explained in the Season Seven opener that he grew up very poor, “but Trixie, she has it all! Her biggest problem is what to wear the next day.” This distinction isn’t necessarily tied to the gendered aspects of drag. Trinity (the Tuck) Taylor noted in the sixth episode of Season Nine that she prefers to maintain “a big separation between Trinity and Ryan. And it’s not necessarily like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be feminine,’ or anything, because I’m a pretty feminine guy.” Each individual negotiates cohabitation with their alter ego in a slightly different way.

Drag Race contestants don’t have complete control over their performance on the show. Character presentation depends upon the themes and challenges of episodes, feedback from RuPaul and the other judges, and in some cases influence from audiences and other drag queens. They are also at the mercy of the show’s editors, who can weave together a near-infinite number of stories from the footage accumulated over several weeks, and whose choices will ultimately shape the final product. The challenge for contestants is to bring the best characters, impersonations, and “true selves” to life on the stage as well as backstage. They have to carefully navigate across various stage personas, while at the same time letting their authentic selves shine through and hoping the edit will reflect well upon them.

Goffman made an important distinction between “front stage” and “backstage” behavior. In everyday interactions, he argued that while “front stage” actions are visible to the audience and are part of the performance, “backstage” behaviors are usually not. However, in RuPaul’s Drag Race , that is not the case. Instead, the audience can witness different types of performances. On stage, Drag Race contestants attempt to create an authentic characterization from the audience’s perspective, while backstage they focus on developing their character through revealing their personal shortcomings and weaknesses, fears, and past traumas.

In Goffman’s terms, drag queens on the show are required to build ‘fronts’ so they can stay in, and hopefully win the competition. Fronts consist of three components: physical setting, appearance , and manner . Physical setting refers to the material context of the drag queens’ performance, like whether they are being filmed on the runway, backstage, a music video set, or a (now rare) external location. Appearance is related to the overall “look”—the clothes, makeup, and accessories they don for their drag—while manner captures the role-related aspects of performance, such as how they speak and act when portraying a particular character. To serve realness and become a ‘fierce queen,’ Drag Race contestants have to construct masterful fronts both on stage and backstage, and create an easily recognizable, likeable, professional, and yet accessible public image.

Within the artifice of drag, the reality television expectation of authenticity often drives the queens to confess their personal struggles in the Werk Room, confessional interviews, backstage in Untucked , or even on the runway. These stories can serve a number of purposes: to puncture the armor of performance and make the queens seem more approachable to audiences (and judges); to give contestants a more compelling story line for the season; and, ultimately, to leverage these demonstrations of vulnerability to increase their perceived realness.

Monica Beverly Hillz confessing on the runway her true gender identity as a trans woman in Season Five is one strong example (Peppermint made a similar confession in the Werk Room in Season Nine), but queens have confessed struggles with weight, eating disorders, HIV, parental abandonment, prison time, and more. The overall theme of overcoming hardship is framed as an inspirational message for their fellow queens, many of whom have had similar experiences, but also for any viewers who might find hope for their own lives in the stories told in front of the makeup mirror.

Manuel Betancourt has pointed out that clips of these “private, confidence-boosting anthems” shared as “communal moments for public consumption” are often interwoven by editors into narratives to bolster themes of self-empowerment through drag. The process of physical transformation for the stage serves to bring forth hidden resources of strength and fabulousness that the performer may not even be aware of, or have trouble accessing in everyday life. According to this narrative, drag performance represents a specific kind of authenticity, able to express the “realest” facets of a queen’s character and personality. The audiences, and judges, are the arbiters of how effectively this is communicated.

We can witness this effect even more clearly through some of the makeover challenge participants, who enthusiastically embrace their new persona. Seeing burly camera operator Sarge transformed into the sassy lady Wintergreen (Season Nine, Episode 10) or YouTube personality Chester See exclaim, “Mother! I am beautiful!” to his makeover mama Miz Cracker (Season Ten, Episode 10), and prance down the runway as a very naughty girl, it’s hard not to buy into the idea that while the clothes may make the man, the drag may uncover something else entirely that lies hidden within.

Throughout the run of the show, judges have frequently commented on how important vulnerability and emotion are to the process of becoming America’s next drag superstar. We can’t love you if we don’t know you, the reasoning goes, and we can’t know you unless you let us in. Some queens find this a harder challenge than any badly written sketch or high-concept runway theme, however. When Michelle Visage told Willam in the fifth episode of Season Four that she still didn’t feel as though she knew him, he dodged her point with one of his usual quips, saying, “I tend to think that emotions are for ugly people.”

Drag Race is about performance and authenticity. It may involve a costume, glamazon heels, or demand “Daytime Dog Park Realness” (Season Four), but it always requires queens to express their inner self and experiences within the constraints of the challenge or runway, while remaining rooted in real vulnerability on and offstage. Like many of the pillars of the show, runway themes are a direct descendent of New York City’s ball culture of the Seventies and Eighties, as depicted in the movie Paris Is Burning or, more recently, on the FX series Pose .

These are the origins of “club kid style,” most infamously represented on Drag Race by Vivacious in Season Six, with a signature drag ball sashaying walk and a style epitomized by her entrance look with Ornacia (arguably the most unjustly treated contestant in Drag Race herstory). In contrast to these creative and highly stylized looks, “realness” runways in ball culture required participants to pass as authentic representatives of the category. The standards for “Executive Realness,” a category in Seasons One, Five, and Six, will punish a contestant who shows up in a cocktail dress (BenDeLaCrème) or sequined tunic (Darienne Lake), but reward Bianca Del Rio’s real estate agent chic.

Drag Race “realness” can be defined as an ongoing process of performative becoming that reflects Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, especially if we filter it through Goffman’s theories of identity and place it within the setting of the Ru-niverse. Serving up this kind of realness entails a set of specific ingredients. First, perceived emotional vulnerability , in which the veil of performance is occasionally punctured or thinned to reveal glimpses of suggestive depth and personal struggle. If the judges feel a queen is “self-producing,” as they suspected of Miz Cracker in Season Ten, or “too perfect” like Chad Michaels in Season Four, the contestants fail to achieve the desired level of realness, and their Drag Race career will be cut short.

Drag Race is a commercial enterprise, a vehicle for marketing RuPaul’s music and products from shoes to candy bars, and which is in turn supported by advertisers and aired on commercial television networks. As a consequence, contestants’ unique expressions of self and negotiation of vulnerability must also be carefully balanced with a gloss of professionalism , meaning the ability to convey that seemingly authentic voice through commercially viable modes of performance. Increased visibility of the show beyond its original niche fan base has also meant both a higher production budget and a narrower range of expression to avoid upsetting sponsors or mainstream audiences. In Season Two, Raja wore a Carrie-inspired blood-spattered dress and joked about being on her period, while in All Stars 4 , Manila was asked not to wear a maxipad-inspired dress on the runway.

Today’s queens also have to navigate the complicated intersections of self-expression and self-presentation online, especially on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, during and after the show. However, the show may make strategically considered decisions to air socially conscious arguments when the risks are outweighed by the potential for broader conversation and awareness, such as the arguments about racial injustice between The Vixen and first Aquaria then Eureka, in Season Ten, and later with RuPaul herself. These culminated in The Vixen storming off the stage during the reunion and refusing to return, which was a gamble on her part as well. A public rift with the RuPaul brand can be the end of a lucrative drag career—or launch a new one as a renegade with the connection network of a Ru girl but who prefers to lob shade grenades from outside the kingdom, like Willam. Advertisers can be appeased when audiences are invested enough in the conflict to increase discussions, views, and shares.

Challenge after challenge, runway after runway, contestants stand before the judges to be evaluated. The only way they can stay in the game and continue competing for the crown is by receiving validation from RuPaul , who is the ultimate authority of Drag Race realness. When push comes to shove (or death drop), the person who decides which queens are the best at “being in the world” of Drag Race is RuPaul herself. She alone has the power to decide who most completely represents the past, present, and future of drag and the Drag Race brand, and who offers an original way of being that she deems worth rewarding.

Drag Race “realness” therefore represents the pursuit of both validation and freedom for contestants, who publicly negotiate their identities in a manner that allows audience members and fans to participate vicariously in those same pursuits. Since he saw Dasein as firmly situated in the world and affected by experiences, Heidegger might argue that everyone who watches the show experiences a bit of drag right alongside the queens serving realness on stage or in the Werk Room. We can all be part of a Valentina-style French vanilla fantasy and turn it into a piece of our own reality.