part0017

To win this particular game requires more from these queens. It requires … something . That something, however, is not clearly defined. There are no obvious rules. Thus, the two bottom queens must do their best. They dance. Or do their sickest death drops. Or move across the stage, owning it. Or remain firmly stuck in one place as Latrice Royale did in her performance of Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman.” Or throw their wigs away as if on fire.

The important thing is to win, and to win means to command the attention of the judges. But there’s no generally accepted and agreed upon criteria for how to judge a lip sync. It seems that the most successful way to win is to open up—to the music, to the judges, to the audience. And playing, according to some philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer or Gilles Deleuze, is all about “opening up.”

Allegedly, this lack of clear rules allows for some favoritism. Everybody knows that Ru, especially in the first seasons, did not shy away from favoring queens who exemplified more of what Ru was about, which has led her to drop comedy queens (like Pandora Boxx) in favor of pageant queens. This tendency, obviously, has changed over the years. However, the lack of clear rules also emphasizes that playing and gaming are more complicated than commonly believed. And if a thing is complicated, philosophy is here to investigate it.

You would think that philosophers don’t say much about the everyday activities of everyday people, occupied as they are in metaphysical questions, but guess what—they do, even about silly things such as games.

One of the most commonly played games on the show is the play on words. This particular game shows up not only through the act of throwing shade, but also with the complex but playful terminology so embedded in the show. To understand RuPaul’s Drag Race , a dictionary for rookies is not a bad idea. Terms and phrases such as “sashay away,” “shantay, you stay,” “condragulations,” “C.U.N.T,” “henny,” “herstory,” “reading,” “realness,” or “werk” can be understood within the context of the show.

We can distinguish three types of word-play in the linguistic equipment of the show: First, some metaphors and reassigned terms that have a long history within drag culture, like “work” or “slay,” having determined meanings and history within drag subculture. Second, terms that are coming from other linguistic influences, like African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Polari, foreign languages (mainly Spanish) or region-specific slang that has been incorporated into drag lingo. And third, RuPaul herself has been coining many current Drag Race -specific puns like “condragulations” or a “ru-veal,” with judges (Michelle’s “eloguent”) and participants (Alaska’s “Hieee” or Pearl’s “Flazéda”) contributing as well.

All these word games are not indifferent to philosophy, even though Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the first philosophers to write about play, was certainly not referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (he died in 1951). Wittgenstein invented the term “language games” to point out that our communicative interactions often resemble games: rule-guided interactions in which we attempt to achieve a certain communicative goal. Discount the “pretend reality,” and we’re at Adams’s definition from earlier. However, there are some relevant differences to keep in mind: language games are a type of play that functions without an explicit list of rules.

Wittgenstein compares language to a game, and suggests that language consists of a diverse array of communicative instances called “language games” that do not purport any essential, “hard” meaning. He suggests that how we follow a rule is not just a function of the rule itself, but also of how we apply the rule in action, as the queens do in lip sync battles. There are some rules, however flimsy, that are only to be broken down as they accommodate specific scenarios that turn up during the battle. But what exactly are we doing when we take part in language games?

Wittgenstein argued that a word must be understood in accordance with its use in language—within a context or phrase—rather than “fixed” to a reference or meaning. In short, every word you use has its meaning because of the way you were taught to use it. The meaning of words can be “hard”—relatively independent of what the language users think (for example, the concept of “two” will always refer to a specific number of distinct entities)—but their use is still guided by the context and the rules we agree upon with it. In his Philosophical Grammar , Wittgenstein states: “If we look at the actual use of a word, what we see is something constantly fluctuating.”

But let’s not be too Sasha Velour about this and be a bit more Kimora Blacc, keeping it simple by discussing this idea with a drag term: “realness.” Initially, the word refers to something that “looks real” and this definition seems to be obvious. For people with little knowledge of drag culture, “realness” can be understood as “passing for a woman.” Not so, however, as the word means something more. It does not involve looking like a real woman but as the “essentialized,” hyperbolic absolute fake image of glamour and femininity traditionally associated with a specific category or genre. In some sense, realness, rather than meaning “the real,” refers to the iconic but fake. With this twist subverting the use of anything associated with “real,” the “realness” challenges an established language game by playing with it. Another word, “herstory,” playfully toys with gender, a queer construction matching together history (his story ) and her. Linguistically, “her-story” does not make much sense, as the etymology of “history” is Latin, and not “his story.” However, “herstory” as a play on the standard term already purports a certain perspective: herstory is history from a queer or feminist perspective.

In other words, play slips into RuPaul’s Drag Race already through the simple stance of communication; words and phrases are comprehensible—all of them follow a set of basic rules regarding coherence—but are given new meanings after being filtered through the queer norms of the show. Despite “language games” being ubiquitous in daily life, RuPaul’s Drag Race puts it on a whole new level: playing a game on language games.

In our troubled times, fraught with increasing angriness in communication, we always seem to be on the brink of breakdown. Even worse, we usually consider that we’re right and the other person is wrong. This transforms our communicative partner to what Gadamer calls “the Other,” a subject filled with insurmountable difference. The concept of “the Other” establishes the scenario of Manichean difference that separate into two mutually excluding teams: Us (always good people) and Them (the bad people or, at least, the people with the “wrong” ideas). As a result, we abandon dialogue. We shut down to communication with the Other.

Gadamer’s conception of play enables us to engage with Others and opens up ethical possibilities to listen to each other, to cooperate, to become “sisters” in a competitive world. Play holds the possibilities of bridging the gaps between people created by our inability to communicate effectively, because play can add that extra layer of empathy. Metaphorically speaking, according to Gadamer’s 1960 book Truth and Method , play has a life of its own, becoming a time and space filled with possibilities. This kind of autonomous life is the very essence of play. A game only refers to itself, with no exterior meaning. It creates a world of its own with rules of its own where people can just “be,” momentarily transported out of ordinary existence. Many times, plays involve breaking the rules of the ordinary world, such as in Drag Race by rewarding men who dress as women.

According to Gadamer, play has a feature that makes it an interesting case study for philosophy; it involves willingness . In order to play, people agree to adopt a new set of rules—the rules of the game—and thereby leave the rules of common life behind for just a moment. In this sense, there is a double meaning of play within RuPaul’s Drag Race : first, all the queens must accept the rules of the show, such as no telling who the winner is while the show is airing, not communicating with the outside world during filming and not do whatever Willam has done. Further, all the queens make their grand entrance fully dressed in drag, a mark delimiting the game; they are there to play. Even their first line after entering the work room—some statement particular to their characters—establishes they are in “play-mode.” Tag-lines set up the stage on which the drag character is intended to be introduced. Out of drag, however, they remain playing; as competitors within a TV reality show, they know that the camera is always watching them. As they have no more to sell to audiences than themselves, drama (with a big “D”: “Drama!”) must ensue.

Continuing with Gadamer, the author explains that the game has predominance over the different players. The player must be fully immersed in both—the character and the game—to win. When Michelle Visage or RuPaul herself congratulate a particular queen for “staying in character” in the Snatch Game, they are basically following Gadamer; what they notice is the fact that the competitor is fully in play-mode, completely overtaken by the celebrity she is impersonating. This is essential to winning the Snatch Game. The queen who only embraces her character half-heartedly is doomed to fail. In All Stars 4 , for example, Latrice Royale is so annoyed by fellow competitor Gia Gunn that she is unable to keep in character. Chi Chi DeVayne’s Maya Angelou in All Stars 3 is only half-hearted, as the contestant admitted later that she has very little knowledge about the American writer. Trixie Mattel was rightly dragged on All Stars 3 for doing an impression of RuPaul that was basically just repeating “buy my album,” without further development of the character. There is a reality raised from the play and this understanding cannot take place without the dedication of the engaged, communicative competitor. In other words, the player must be open to the truths of this new reality that is the game, remaining fully in character no matter the challenge.

Successful communication requires openness both to the Other and the play. Openness and commitment must be understood as a readiness to challenge old, traditional forms of one’s being and thereby “coming out” from the play transformed. Mama Ru is always asking her girls to open themselves up to the game. There is a perfect example for this in Season Ten. The game was “Evil Twins,” a challenge completely orchestrated around the idea of openness. The main idea behind the challenge was that each queen must create a DoppelgĠnger of herself, but not just any DoppelgĠnger: an “evil” one. This challenge was designed to get the queens to deeply introspect the ways in which their Inner Saboteur (a concept RuPaul has discussed time and again on the show that could be described as the negative energy that keeps you from reaching your best self) keeps them from attaining their potential and turn that little monster into an “evil twin” character for the runway. To win, each participant must really open up. When RuPaul exchanges some words with Aquaria in the work room, Ru notices that the young queen is not really opening up, preferring rather to speak of fashion and glitter than about herself. Ru is clearly concerned. Aquaria is not understanding the concept of this particular game and, thus, she is not opening up to herself and the other competitors. Aquaria is holding back. Without this openness, the process of play is useless: the player is still stuck to the rules of ordinary existence.

Openness to play is such an important factor in Drag Race that the examples may never end. The judges are always chastising competitors for “dropping the character” or lack of engagement with the game. In that same season, both Ross Mathews and Michelle Visage chastise Eureka because she was not able to carry on with the comic play of “Breastworld.” Besides the question of whether the play was really funny to begin with (it was not), the problem was that Eureka felt awkward, not completely in character and, as such, closed to the game. In Episode 5 of Season Three, India Ferrah is unable to open herself and play as weather girl, resulting in being rather a dead weight to her team than engaged in competition. In Episode 2 of Season Four, The Princess can’t get out of her shyness and give everything (or at least what the judges expected) when the challenge was to become a queen of wrestling. She’s unable to drop her low-profile drag character.

Openness in play involves the recognition of the Other as an important partner in the non-common world established through the game. A game creates the context of a good space and time for us to open up to Others, so we can be affected by those Others that we often do not listen to in the common world. In short: if you don’t open up to Others in a game, you can’t play with them. Again, RuPaul’s Drag Race has a game to meet this criterion of openness: the makeover challenge. Almost all the seasons contain the challenge of turning a person with no direct drag experience (social media performers; the crew of the show; kick-ass female boxers; random dad volunteers; etc.) into a “sister” or a “mother” (as in Season Two or All Stars 2). This involves a deep process of paying attention to what the Other has to say, how comfortable he or she is with drag and how it will affect him or her. Family resemblance is more than throwing on matching glasses like Monét X Change did in Season Ten. This queer “family resemblance” is all about commitment to the Other. It’s a process of two persons collaborating together, rather than a game of one. Both, the drag queen and the made-over person, are obliged to open up together and to each other to take the win. During the final critiques, the edit always flips between the drag queens at the main stage and their “sisters” watching in the lounge room, both sharing the thrill and the disappointments; a sense of family has been created. And in Season Ten, this make-over challenge has been led to the full conclusion of opening up. Presenting themselves in both an evil and a good version forced the queens to not only open up to someone else, but to themselves—something some queens obviously had a hard time achieving.

Still, no game obliges the contestants to fully open up to audiences more than the feared lip sync. Even if there are no hard rules (with the exception of mouthing one’s lips to the lyrics), the game requires the queens to fully embrace the song and the lyrics, to give a unique, personal interpretation of what the song is or can be about. In Season One, maybe because it was the first season, both Victoria “Porkchop” Parker and Tammie Brown made their lip sync performances only halfhearted, without even trying to match the lyrics with the movements of their lips. In fact, both queens did not even open their mouths, thus losing the game due to their lack of commitment. Opening up is not just important for Gadamer, but also a condition to win RuPaul’s Drag Race .

Both Deleuze and Bakhtin follow the concept of “opening up” to the outside world through play. Deleuze argues that play is an affirmation of creativity that opens us up to experimentations rather than keeping us anchored to routine, common practices of everyday life.

Deleuze’s philosophy is like watching the thought process of Joslyn Fox: obscured, without clear rules, wandering and always shifting from one topic to another. Even if this makes Deleuze a philosopher who is hard to crack open (and, admittedly, difficult to “read”), his writings and philosophy are, like gaming itself, playful. Deleuze invites us to think differently. The author critiques current analytical philosophy, which can be describes as being absorbed by the idea that any philosophical concept can be traced back to a single point of origin. There are dividing branches and different leaves of any particular concept, but everything comes from the same point, a hierarchical source of some original root idea. This conceptualization of meaning of philosophical terminology dominates philosophy, thus denying any alternative reconstruction (since everything comes from the same point). To contrast this idea, Deleuze proposes instead the concept of rhizomatic thinking, a network of connections and heterogeneity. Rather than being the product of a univocal center, rhizomatic thought is decentered. There are no hierarchies; thus, any idea holds the same value, producing “different statements, different desires,” as he writes in his 1980 work, A Thousand Plateaus . The rhizomatic is opposed to what Deleuze calls the arborescent, the reconstruction of the history of philosophy and philosophies as tree-like. The arborescent works with binary categories (male/female, human/non-human, high/low, etc.) and is linear (an idea is followed by another idea through a chain of causality through time). The tree-like thinking searches for the “origin” of things while the rhizomatic, the diverse and even-leveled multiplicity establishes connections between branches of thinking, historical times, organizations of power and other influences. The rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle. In other words, it is no woman or man: it is drag.

One of the most important consequences is that humans are not being considered the ultimate being in the world anymore. Animals, plants, and minerals alike occupy a place of value together with humans, a concept cherished by the philosophy of posthumanism. Posthuman thinking wants to decenter the position of the human as the measure of all things—even in a show where all the judges have their words but the final decision “is mine” according RuPaul, who sits as a God-like figure at the center of the universe. Still, we argue, the show decenters the human.

One of the most entertaining mini challenges is the one where they apply drag to an inanimate object, such as a teddy bear. So, contestants have to drag up a doll (Season Two; Season Five), a cardboard box (Season Two) or a pancake (All Stars 3 ). Shangela makes the (very dreadful) “Frostula,” a snowman (Snowwoman? Snowqueen?) version of herself, as if she can project her identity and personality via an object (Season Three, Episode 2). To complicate things further, Shangela actually dresses herself as “Frostula” in All Stars 3 . An inanimate object becomes a drag queen and, later, a drag queen becomes an object. In the Episode 3 of Season Five, Alaska and Lineysha Sparx projected their personalities into a life-sized doll called Lil’ Poundcake. The creepy doll is so “alive” with attitude that it (she?) will become Alaska’s deranged beauty pageant contestant alter-ego.

But what are the rules to make a thing “drag”? The queens must embellish or “werk” that inanimate object. How do they do that? Again, no rules. The only thing that predominates is imagination. Of course, there are some rules like time constraints and almost all the competitors give human features to the pancake, but the general idea of “transferring” the (human) concept of drag to a box requires, ultimately, an effort of imagination. It requires thinking outside of the box, so to speak.

Another form of this alternative way of thinking is our concept of morals. Good and evil are, many philosophers claim, social constructs: historically, humans fabricated what is good, what is bad, and then hid this fabrication behind a shining coat of “essence” (claiming it to be a natural property, for a truth that transcends humans). In fact, to take a Nietzschean approach here: humans in general did not invented morals but some humans did it; those who hold the power. And those who held power, especially historically, used morality to establish and strengthen institutions that were designed to suppress and pathologize any alternate thinking, living and loving while promoting a distinct ideal.

In fact, “queer” was considered a bad word and an insult by representatives of the heteronormative power structure, right up until the time collectives such as the feminist movement and LGBTQ+ activists took it and made it their own, a form of subversion and identity-building against invisibility and contempt.

In our ordinary life, however, we mostly follow these categories as if they are a natural kind. We know what being good or bad means in our culture and time. There are rules to follow to keep the community working properly and one of the most important is behaving “well.” The queens, however, are at their best when they misbehave. The “baddest bitch” is the best. Ask Bianca Del Rio, one of the most successful queens to emerge from the show. Even sweet BenDeLaCrème knows how to read her competitors. So, essentially, the audience is cheering playful representations of stereotypical evil. To accept this last affirmation, we must think outside the box and accept that our ordinary behavior and thinking is sustained by binary formulas that ought to be disassembled: inanimate objects can be turned into “drag queens” and evilness can be strategically good in the game. Any concept is intellectually mobile; the important thing is to think creatively and differently about systems of classification and hierarchies.

The idea of “opening up” and the destruction of the hierarchies separating good and bad through the dynamics of play were further analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin and his well-known concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque (he seems to have predicted Sharon Needles). For Bakhtin, the official language of common life, always serious and dry, divides us into hierarchies: male and female, upper class and working class, normal and abnormal, good people and bad people.

Even if Bakhtin did not specifically write about play, in his 1965 book, Rabelais and His World , he furnished ideas about a time frame lifted from the hardness of common daily life: the carnival. People mainly live two lives: their serious one oriented towards rules, social hierarchies, and norms, and another one—the carnival time—that can be considered “unofficial.” The latter is a time where norms are broken to produce laughter and a sense of freedom. The binary thinking is temporarily suspended and transgression is celebrated. Michelle kept getting RuPaul to crack up by stage-whispering “Vanjie” to her for pretty much all of Season Ten after Miss Vanjie got eliminated, and Ru would laugh even while she was trying to have a serious judging discussion. Further, this is a show where judges always cheer (good) ad-libbing rather than sticking to the letter. The use of costumes, humor and laughter ensures freedom to some extent and for some time. The feast of carnival is a time of play, where social and cultural hierarchies (death) drop, where “low” people (the poor, pariahs, criminals, etc.) blend together with the best of the best—where a working class man can share a cup of wine with his boss, or the immoral can break bread with the religious monk. It is a time where drag queens can be tops! Why y’all gagging?

The image of “two times,” one official, the other celebratory, parallels the main frame of the show. One moment, the queens are presented in full drag (the carnival time); later, the “official” life resumes with the contestants out of drag. This “out of drag” time returns them to the official life of rules where everything is black or white, good or bad, masculine or feminine (however and as affirmed above, they mostly still play for the cameras, so staying in play-mode through the show, being in the confessionals, the work room or the Interior Illusions Lounge). Drag, in turn, allows the competitors to dress and act in devious, creative ways without fear of being chastised for their misbehavior. This is the very thing about drag queens that makes them fearsome creatures to people who only live in official, “normal” time. Even when the majority of the queens will “sashay away” at the end, RuPaul always has words of encouragement for them. Their “Amen!” is a closure that means two things: even the losers are loved by Mama Ru and the world of drag queens is a playful blend of traditional religion with the devious.

Still, the most carnivalesque of times is, clearly, the finale of each season, with everybody reunited to crown the next drag superstar of the year. Beyond any rules Drag Race has applied to the contestants over the course of the season, the finale is a place for pure joy and laughter. A carnival where men can kiss other men on national TV and people can wear the most outrageous garments and makeup, and they can be celebrated for it. Just like in play, there are internal workings of this particular time and space, where people create rather than follow an external logic. Just show someone who has never seen Drag Race the finale of Season Nine and see how a bald drag queen with rose petals under her wig will confuse them on multiple levels. You will see no other time in which being carnivalesque is more imperative than during a RuPaul’s Drag Race finale—the main reason why the finales are so adored throughout the entire world.