part0021

I n the Season Ten Reunited episode, after The Vixen leaves the stage in anger, an emotional argument erupts between RuPaul and Asia O’Hara. Putting the show’s editorial considerations aside, the argument seems authentic and touches on a tension that is an ongoing feature of Drag Race .

Two visions of what drag is, beyond questions of fishiness or avant-gardism, with a beard or without, have collided repeatedly throughout the decade in a conflict I claim cannot be resolved.

We can call the first set of values the “four cardinal virtues” of RuPaulian drag: “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent” (or C.U.N.T. virtues), as the song says, virtues one needs to trust for “her body to tell the truth.” This set of values is anchored in an individualistic credo, aimed at bringing drag to completely new levels of professionalism, polished fashion, and strict criterions of quality, making it in the process a full-fledged mainstream entertainment industry, worth millions with no place for second best.

The second set of values is more implicit, and has been taken over by the show from the historical practices and lived experiences of LGBTQ+ persons throughout the twentieth century: acceptance, solidarity, support, and empowerment, or what I will term A.S.S.E values. Drag queens, historically, have been at the forefront of struggles for inclusion and equality from the Stonewall riots to ACT-UP. These values are never brought forward explicitly or in the same outspoken manner as the C.U.N.T. virtues; however, they are made manifest and represented throughout the show’s seasons through the life stories of different queens and dramatic stage confessions, which have allowed broaching complicated issues such as discrimination, family and self-acceptance, living with HIV, and trans identities. The values of RuPaul’s Drag Race have been continuously lip-synching for their lives and it seemed that no one is going home.

While the show is not making any explicit, exclusive choice between C.U.N.T. or A.S.S.E. (as some of us have done), I maintain that its lack of decision is devaluing the latter. The focus on values and their worth is the result of the work of an emblematic figure in the history of philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, who introduced the question of the value of values.

The argument between Ru and Asia revolved around what should have been done to prevent The Vixen from leaving. Asia takes to heart the evident pain of the The Vixen, who was goaded repeatedly throughout the season by Eureka. According to her, there is a deep sense of injustice in the fact that nobody, including herself, followed The Vixen. She says, “It is our job as people to try and help her through a situation that she is struggling with” thus formulating what we can call “solidarity in the strong sense.” For her, the gay community in general, and “our” drag community specifically, is responsible for the fate of individuals who are struggling in their lives. According to this vision, there is no need to go through life struggling alone since a community is about support and solidarity and its responsibility for its members should be unrestricted.

Ru agrees only partially. She wants to put a limit on that “solidarity in the strong sense” by another value, that of “individual responsibility.” Ru says, “As a community we have responsibility to each other but … at one point you gotta say ‘there is nothing else I can do’.” For Ru, individuals in need of help must “want to meet … halfway.”

Asia flatly rejects that position. For her, the entire logic of a community is not leaving anyone on the side of the road. There’s no triumphant march to equality and acceptance if, when we look behind us, we see that all those who were too vulnerable to meet us halfway were left to struggle on their own. For Asia “our whole purpose here” as a community “is to enrich the lives of other people, and even if I’m met with controversy, I can do that every day because twenty years down the road we’ve got something, because I was persistent in trying to make your life better.” The logic itself, of a community, and of the struggle for the acceptance and equality of LGBTQ+ persons, will lose its validity and its values, if we do not take responsibility for other people’s vulnerability, anger, and hurt.

The return for the patience we exerted when helping those in need is not repaid immediately. We may see the value of it only at the end of the road, when we all stand there together . “Solidarity in a strong sense” is not letting individuals struggle on their own, no matter how hostile they are to our desire to help them. She continues, “It’s ridiculous that our thought process about people is so self-centered that if it’s hard to help somebody we’ll just let them struggle. We’re not just drag queens, we’re people, and now we’ve got one of our people outside … We let one of our sisters walk out of the fucking room because nobody wants to fucking help her and we’re the first people to say that [others] aren’t treating us right.” Help and support in Asia’s version of drag solidarity is not limited by the anger or even refusal to be helped by the person in need.

Ru disagrees vehemently. She argues that if she is fearless, everyone can be fearless: “I have been discriminated against by white people for being black, by black people for being gay, by gay people for being too fem. Did I let that stop me from getting to this chair? No, I had to separate what I feel or what my impression of the situation is to put my focus on the goal … The world is hard; it’s hard to live on this planet. But we all have to learn how to deal with it, but you gotta ask for help first.” For Mama Ru, solidarity can only start when the individual takes the first step. It is limited by “individual responsibility” to one’s own pain, hurt, and vulnerability.

There’s no obvious right or wrong position between these two, nor is it solely an argument between RuPaul and Asia O’Hara. They both have some strong arguments in their favor. It’s a tension that has shaped the show from its inception and on occasions seems to be even a conflict within RuPaul’s vision of the future of drag. In the final episode of Season Ten, The Vixen is back on the main stage. This shows that someone, perhaps even RuPaul, made the effort to convince her to come back.

The angry departure, the argument, and then the return of The Vixen, when taken as a whole, captures nicely the tension between two sets of values that cannot be resolved. Resolving it, deciding for one or the other, will make of the show either a teddy-bear contest where everybody loves each other or a ruthless struggle for survival. I argue that this tension is what makes RuPaul’s Drag Race such a unique reality show and is what gives it the human depth from which stems its remarkable success.

Imagine yourself a shady queen, perhaps the shadiest of all queens. A real bitch for whom the library is never closed. She reads ruthlessly when busy and spends the rest of her time in abandoned clubs. Her readings are so devastating that many simply avoid her. She lives her life in solitude with the exception of a few dedicated friends who have realized the talent of that shadiest of all queens. She dedicates all of her time to her craft, and her craft swallows her completely. Occasionally she gives a performance executed at such a level of perfection rarely anyone can measure up to it.

Yet this life of dedication, solitude, and bouts of ill health takes its toll and she loses herself to delusions of grandeur and ongoing depression. Then, one day, she sees a horse beaten up by its master. She walks up to the horse, hugs it crying, and collapses. She will never regain sanity from that moment on and for the last decade of her life. No doubt, this is a tragic figure. Yet, it may be one who will leave a mark for generations to come due to a commitment to creativity and originality. The truth is there was such a queen, a philosopher who went by the name of Friedrich Nietzsche, who lived in Europe during the nineteenth century.

The figure of Nietzsche is so exceptional in the history of philosophy; it led to what was termed for a time as “the Nietzsche legend.” The legend was that madness manifested itself in Nietzsche because of his dedication to his work and the lack of public attention it garnered when first published in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Some believed that his madness was aggravated by advanced syphilis, a deadly STD at the time. Though we’re unable to trace when and where he contracted the disease, let alone from whom, the disease was used as a moral reproach of his philosophical work.

The legend was exacerbated by the fact that Nietzsche used to write in aphorisms, short paragraphs that on superficial reading do not constitute a coherent whole. He was deemed an inconsistent thinker, a grave sin in philosophy if there ever was one. His literary style of writing, his tendency to use metaphors and controversial statements, made him an easy target for critics who blamed him for anything from Anti-Semitism to misogyny. The use the Nazis made of his philosophy long after his death left his name tarnished. Indeed, Nietzsche’s work, at first, did not seem as though it would leave an important mark on history.

However, from the 1960s onward, his influence eclipsed many other less dramatic yet more structured philosophers. He is considered today one of the most influential figures in the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, the tragedy of his life is not what makes Nietzsche relevant for RuPaul’s Drag Race . What makes Nietzsche relevant is the fact that he asked a crucial philosophical question. Nietzsche’s project, laid out in his 1887 The Genealogy of Morals , was what he termed the “revaluation of all values.” The re-evaluation was dependent on the question: how do social and individual values gain their worth? How do values become valuable?

The method Nietzsche invented to do such an evaluation, which was meant to lead in the end to the creation of new values (hence re-evaluation) was what he termed “genealogy.” In day-to-day use, genealogy is the study of a person’s family tree, their lineage. Philosophical genealogy, much like family genealogy traces something in history from the present to the past. Nietzsche’s genealogy, differently from most historiographical perspectives, does not try to explain today by tracings its causes in the past. If you take a drag family tree, let’s say your own and start tracing it back to your drag mothers and other influences, it will give the image of inverted tree roots. You start by one name and then add more and more names, until, when you look at your tree three or four generations back, you see that your “origin” is dispersed in multiple persons. There isn’t a single source that led to you, that “caused” you, not even if you are RuPaul herself.

Much like a family tree, philosophical genealogy traces the different and at times contradictory sources of an event or a value in the multiplicity of past events. It seeks a possible relative meaning (and never an absolute one) in plural causes that may be, at first glance, completely nonconsequential for “important history,” that of famous people and the political events that shaped our world.

In his Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche introduced the idea that values are produced via conflict. The conflict can be social or psychological, and in many instances, it’s both, but once a set of values has prevailed over another it gains in value. Hence, society for Nietzsche does not evolve through history towards a specific form, and societies cannot be arranged according to an absolute ladder of right and wrong, where previous societies are by definition less evolved than contemporary ones. For him, there is no “view from nowhere” concerning values. You cannot write a history of values that will be always and everywhere correct. It means that for Nietzsche, knowledge in general and values specifically are always “perspectival,” meaning that they are formulated by a specific someone with a particular position, history, and interests.

In my view, the unresolved conflict of Drag Race is crucial for the show’s success and uniqueness. Without the tension, RuPaul’s Drag Race would not be what it is, a fierce yet humane competition between talented, creative, and fragile human beings.

There are four clearly-stated values that have been put forward consistently throughout the show’s decade run. They are introduced as early as the first episode of Season One: charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. According to Mama Ru, these values are meant to take drag to the highest level. The entire vision of the show is motivated by a desire to flip-flop drag from a bottom and to “bring drag into the position it deserves, right at the top” (Season One, Episode 9).

The C.U.N.T. values are instrumental in making this vision a reality. If we can judge following ten years of Drag Race and the social and cultural impact it had, they have been successful in bringing drag to a completely new level and simultaneously mainstreaming it. Drag has become an industry. It is moving away from being a sub-culture of the gay scene towards full-fledged mainstream entertainment. Some people can actually make a living out of drag, and for a minority drag has transformed into a profitable, moneymaking enterprise. Heck, it even has a volume in this “Popular Culture and Philosophy” series!

However, the C.U.N.T. values are not LGBTQ+ communal values. They are individualistic, market related values. They capture something about what it means to be an exceptional professional in any field of creative/artistic endeavor nowadays, and in this context, it is applied to drag. These values are used in the show to filter the competitors in order to capture what is unique, original, and can transcend aesthetic and performative conventions beyond the restricted limits of the historical sub-culture of drag.

These four values are not community-oriented per se. If they can teach a drag queen something, it is not solidarity or acceptance, but “what life is really in showbiz” as RuPaul declares in Season Three, Episode 16. As such, and given the fact that they are the values of reality TV as well as other aspects of a market-driven society where competition is understood as the only way to determine who deserves what, they encourage a certain form of behavior.

Some queens have shown throughout the seasons not only the ability to think strategically, but also to undermine the confidence of other competitors and to make of reading a way of life. “Elevating the art of drag,” (incidentally the title of Season Four, Episode 12) which RuPaul finds crucial, cannot be taken as a self-evident concept. What does RuPaul mean by “elevating”? Who will tell us drag has been elevated, and when? The process of elevation is precisely a process of value transformation, of a re-evaluation, as Nietzsche understands it. The values of merit will be brought into the heart of drag and mutate the values that were there historically. Hence, an elevation of certain values will always entail a degradation of other values. Some values will need to be sacrificed in order for C.U.N.T. to become supreme. What are these old, replaceable values?

Why does a competition aimed at pushing drag to a completely new level needs a Miss Congeniality? If this is just a regular reality TV show competition, why is it not enough to have just one winner who takes it all? What values are embodied in the choice to have a Miss Congeniality each season in addition to the Next Drag Superstar?

In the Reunited episode of Season Nine, Valentina was elected as Miss Congeniality. However, this choice was immediately contested by the other queens. In an act of defiance both toward the production and to the fans of the show, the queens refused Valentina the title of Miss Congeniality and replaced it with “Fans’ Favorite.” Whether Valentina deserved to be treated this way or not is beside the point for my argument. What’s crucial here is that the queens understood Miss Congeniality to stand for something beyond mere social-media popularity.

Something in Valentina’s behavior during and after the show precluded the possibility of her becoming Miss Congeniality. The title clearly stands for other values. Congenial means “of a pleasant disposition, friendly, and sociable.” It means that a queen who receives the title of Miss Congeniality does not represent the C.U.N.T. virtues but rather A.S.S.E. virtues: acceptance, solidarity, support, and empowerment.

I believe that Miss Congeniality and its very existence as a category in a competition such as Drag Race captures something that has to be made explicit. We usually do not expect to see a prize for “Mrs. Nice Gal” in reality TV competition shows, or in any other competition for that matter. On the contrary, if reality TV has taught us anything in the last two decades, it is that being sincerely friendly and warm in a survival-style competition is not what helps you get the title (or the money). Yet if it has a place of honor in RuPaul’s Drag Race , it is because the show tries to represent other values as well.

RuPaul has repeatedly expressed the idea that doing drag is a courageous act that needs support. As she says, “anyone who can step out of the house in high heels and lipstick is my hero” (Season One, Episode 2). Drag is “an act of treason in a male dominated society” (Season One, Episode 9), hence it is not without risk and requires courage. The courage of drag comes from the fact that it is “part of sisterhood” and drag queens “are all sisters, … all family. If one of us is in pain, we’re all in pain, we’re all in trouble” (Season One, Episode 4).

It seems that C.U.N.T. virtues require A.S.S.E. to come into effect. You can’t be fierce all on your own, or else you will face what Nietzsche faced: solitude, alienation, and madness (at least you can’t get syphilis all on your own!). It becomes clear that for RuPaul, at any rate in Season One, drag is not only about a performance executed to perfection. However, though the values of RuPaul and the show’s production are more explicit in Season One, these values are never far from being conjured when need arises in subsequent seasons.

For example, in Season Six we receive a 101 in Drag Herstory which appears on screen with pictures of famous gay icons while Ru narrates: “Drag is underground and over the top. Drag is political and politically incorrect. Drag is camp and couture. Drag is punk and mainstream. Drag is a laugh riot and it could start a revolution. Drag is never having to say you’re sorry, because drag is all about being whoever the hell you want to be” (Season Six, Episode 14).

The famous drag and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson’s picture is shown here for a second time in the show’s history. She is rumored to be the drag queen who threw the first brick that started the gay liberation movement in 1968. In the first season, her picture was shown initially accompanied by the phrase: “If you’re out, proud, and living it, you have a drag queen to thank” (Season One, Episode 7). Moreover, acceptance is one of the crucial values that has been repeatedly put forward until it became a catch phrase: “RuPaul’s Drag Race , still bringing families together.” Not only the acceptance of homosexuality and drag, but of HIV+ status and trans identities as well.

These values of acceptance, solidarity, support, and empowerment are not compatible with charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. A.S.S.E. doesn’t go hand in hand with C.U.N.T. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive but always competing for one’s attention. Solidarity at times can work with charisma, uniqueness, and nerve. However, it’s more difficult to reconcile solidarity with talent and it’s certain that if we’re speaking of a “winner takes all” situation (a zero-sum game) the tension becomes unsustainable. Some queens have succeeded in encompassing all of them, but always in a different context and specific relationships throughout a given season, never in a constant manner. In the end and in the vision of drag the show explicitly promotes, they do collide.

In the Season Three Reunited episode, Raja excuses the Heathers’ nasty behavior by saying that nobody will watch a competition show where everyone is nice and respectful to each other (Season Three, Episode 16). The critical question we should be asking is “Why not?” Raja’s statement goes unchallenged by Ru and the other queens. However, a competition can focus on the qualities of the competitors without undermining their characters. The Olympic Games are a prime example of that. Yet, what has become prevalent in our societies seems to be the common belief that competition has to be nasty and that only being nasty helps viewers identify who has C.U.N.T. A competition seems to go against what an A.S.S.E. requires: kindness, support, mutual respect, and commitment (and a lot of lube).

In a famous argument between RuPaul and Tammie Brown (Season One, Episode 9), which inspired the song “Responsitrannity,” we come across the tension once more. It is here we understand that these two sets of values, which the show has tried to keep active throughout the seasons, are incompatible according to RuPaul herself. Following the queens’ resentment towards Santino’s acerbic and at times derogatory style of judging throughout the season, Ru says that as drag queens “we’re gonna be up against a lot of criticism.”

Understanding Ru to be saying, “We, drag queens, perhaps even the LGBTQ+ community as a whole,” Tammie asks a legitimate question: “Why feed into that negativity?” She’s critical of the fact that the values captured by the competition and its harsh style of judging copies ways of behaving typical of harmful competitiveness that are exterior to the drag community and imports them. She doesn’t seem to want them to be copy-pasted into what is her community as well. She does not want drag to be taken over by C.U.N.T.s; she would like to keep her A.S.S.E. thick and juicy. Here Ru’s answer is revealing, “Because it is a competitive television show … and they’re polar opposites.” The tension between the harsh competitiveness and the potential manifestations of solidarity (“they”) is what constitutes the show’s “ups and downs” and she goes on to say, “if we all said you’re fabulous all the time” there wouldn’t be a show.

Notice that the first “we” (“We drag queens”) and the second “we” are not similar. The first “we” stands for the drag community, where A.S.S.E. values are crucial. The second “we” stands for TV producers and stars, where we aim at finding who has C.U.N.T. The two “we’s” and the values they represent are simply “polar opposites.” However, this polar opposition is precisely what the show will try to navigate through in the subsequent seasons.

A Nietzschean question led us here. It allowed us to see the conflict inherent in these two sets of values, which is not immediately perceivable when they are accepted as unquestioned. From a bird’s-eye view or from a view from nowhere in particular, A.S.S.E. and C.U.N.T. seem to go together harmoniously. However, this is not the case. Understanding this point would not have been possible without a genealogy on a small scale, without tracing the values and their meaning throughout the show’s ten seasons.

According to Nietzsche, societies and moral values do not necessarily improve over time though they do change throughout history. When RuPaul’s Drag Race claims to elevate drag, it makes a claim to improve something by making it more professional, more star packed, more profitable. The C.U.N.T. values are crucial in order to reach that destination. However, I wonder what will be left of drag if the A.S.S.E. values have to be sacrificed or silenced.

A.S.S.E. values cannot be cashed-in at the bank (some asses can), they are much more difficult to monetize and measure, much more difficult to reward. This makes them even more important to prize and cherish. Agreeing with Asia, some may even go as far as to argue that they are the heart of drag, what has constituted it as a unique set of practices and way of life. The past may have more to teach us than our shiny, money-making present. Although RuPaul’s Drag Race has gained its magic by not making any definitive decision between the two, the pressure of market, profit, and fans pushes the show constantly toward the warm moist embrace of C.U.N.T. If C.U.N.T is the future of drag, we must wonder whether the future always contains the promise of a brighter, better tomorrow.

However, as mentioned earlier, there are queens who have succeeded in combining C.U.N.T. and A.S.S.E. in such a way that at times they transcend the tension between the two. Bianca Del Rio or Latrice Royale are precisely such examples. Latrice won Miss Congeniality and her popularity is so high that since 2012 Ru has brought her back repeatedly in different instances of the show. Bianca is warmly remembered for her spicy demeanor while offering help throughout Season Six to her competitors, specifically Adore Delano, contributing to her rise to the finale of the season. These two examples (there are others) have used their A.S.S.E. as the U in the C.U.N.T. thus contributing to a unique image that is hard to imitate. The fact that both are in their forties and from a generation that witnessed and partook in the struggles that were crucial to the survival and flourishing of the LGBTQ+ community as a whole may have a big role in this.