part0022

G entlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman, win ! According to one standard definition, a drag queen is a female impersonator: a person, usually male, who dresses in women’s clothing and acts with exaggerated femininity for the purpose of entertainment. The language we use to talk about drag queens, and that they use to talk about themselves, is, as a result, feminine. But to what extent is the performance of femininity really essential to being a drag queen?

You’re at the end of another episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race : the queens have turned their fierce runway looks, faced the judges’ critiques, lip-synched for their lives, and the loser has sashayed away. Now, the music is starting up. The queens who’ve lived to slay another day begin to dance and amidst the pumping bass and escalating synth you hear one of Mama Ru’s most beloved maxims: we’re all born naked and the rest is drag !

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, RuPaul seems to suggest that this saying is about the illusory nature of the strict gender binaries that we live under. This puts him in line with the way in which philosophers such as Judith Butler and those influenced by her conceive of gender. The characteristics that pertain to and differentiate between masculinity and femininity, they argue, are an arbitrary or artificial form of classification. There is no fact of the matter when it comes to gender beyond our socio-cultural norms: gender, like drag, is merely a performance we put on.

According to this view, drag is an utterly ordinary phenomenon encompassing every manner of self-presentation—with the singular exception of the naked newborn, everyone from you to your grandmother is in drag. Even if everyone is in drag, however, it’s obvious that not everyone can be a drag queen . This leaves us to puzzle: just what is a drag queen? One answer is that a drag queen is the ordinary phenomenon of drag elevated to a work of art. But what does it mean to be a work of art?

When Marcel Duchamp laid a urinal on its back and called this a work of art, many were incensed and vehemently argued otherwise. Such stories have played out quite frequently since the propagation of avant-garde works beginning in the twentieth century. Other popular examples include composer John Cage’s contentious 4' 33" of silence or Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing , described precisely by its title.

Arthur Danto suggests that ‘not art’ claims are not to be taken literally as a refusal to classify something as art. They are, more often, evaluative claims that the thing in question is not good art. Philosophers, however, have developed theories on both sides of the debate. Although the word ‘theory’ has been used in philosophy in a wide variety of ways, I simply mean a proposition which attempts to answer a ‘What is …?’ question, namely, ‘What is art?’, using the conditions specified in its answer to grant or deny art-status to these avant-garde examples.

While it’s fun to ask the question, ‘What is art?’, according to another influential view defended by Dominic Lopes in his book Beyond Art , the theories which attempt to answer this question represent a clash of philosophical intuitions that will never find a solution. There simply is no general theory that can tell us what it is to be a work of art and, contrary to the initial anxieties avant-garde works always seems to stir up, this isn’t actually a problem.

Our appreciative practices and empirical studies only ever engage with the individual arts, such as painting, music or sculpture—never an all-encompassing category of art, thus, we don’t really need the latter. Instead, Lopes argues for a “buck passing theory of art” in which the art status of any work is merely determined by its being a work in a particular practice where that practice is one of the arts. A lot of the bewilderment surrounding avant-garde artworks in the twentieth century can subsequently be explained because the category of ‘conceptual art’ to which they rightly belong simply didn’t exist at the time.

As such, to say that a drag queen is a work of art is just to say that she is a work in a particular practice, namely, the art of being a drag queen. We might reasonably wonder why we should accept the ‘art of being a drag queen’ as an art. Well, as Lopes along with other philosophers such as George Dickie have argued, what it means to be an art is, in a sense, arbitrary. There is no informative general answer to this question either beyond, perhaps, historical narratives or the similarities the arts have to other arts, which is itself a little vague and possibly circular.

Both painting and literature are commonly classed as arts, for instance, but what similarity truly exists between Monet’s Water Lilies , and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ? If this is the only qualifier, however, it should be relatively uncontroversial that drag is an art form and a drag queen is indeed a work of art whether we think she is good or bad art (just because I dislike Derrick Barry’s drag, for instance, doesn’t mean I can deny she is a work of art). To see this, you need only turn your attention to any episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race . From their wigs to their size 12 heels, these queens are meticulously sculpted, but instead of clay or paint, the creators of these glamorous personas work in the medium of wigs, make-up, and gag-worthy outfits. Funnily enough, while people liked to make fun of Season Five contestant Serena ChaCha for her description of her drag as “soft sculpture,” she may not have been off base after all.

If we accept that a drag queen is a work of art, which is to say, a work in the art of being a drag queen, we must now consider what is characteristic of this particular art practice. Lopes suggests that such an answer is one that will say something about the particular medium and appreciative practices of the art form in question. A medium, here, can be anything from a symbolic system such as language that is characteristic of the art of literature or material stuffs such as paint that is characteristic of the art of painting. Subsequently, appreciative practices simply specify that when we engage with a certain art work, we should appreciate it for what is characteristic of the art form to which it belongs. We would not, for example, want to appreciate a painting as a novel.

One obvious answer to the question of what practice is characteristic of the art of being a drag queen is that it is the practice of female impersonation, defined here as the exaggerated portrayal of femininity. Do we have any reason to doubt this common conception?

Our idea of drag queens as female impersonators comes from our folk conceptions or the ordinary ideas that comprise our shared understanding of the world. As many philosophers including Dominic Lopes, Julian Dodd, and Peter Van Inwagen have noted, however, folk conceptions, while quite useful for detecting, reasoning about, and describing things in our day-today lives can often be inaccurate, strictly speaking.

As Van Inwagen points out, we have a folk concept of the sun ‘rising.’ The sun, as captured by our best scientific theories, does not literally rise—it stays at the center of our solar system but appears to rise because of the Earth’s rotation on its axis. Additionally, although these sorts of precise descriptions may be inconvenient to state in your average conversation, they are valuable to discussions conducted within the sciences, philosophy, and in any other context where we place more emphasis on virtues such as truth, simplicity and explanatory power—that is, where it’s important to try to model the world as accurately as possible, as we are now.

And so, to really determine whether or not female impersonation is indeed the defining practice of the art of being a drag queen, we will need to hold this folk concept up to scrutiny, which means we will have to test its application against our intuitions about examples of drag performances to make sure it accurately captures both the medium and our appreciation of these fabulous queens. If it does not, we will have to find some other practice that can accurately describe the art of being a drag queen.

Our first glimpse into how we might separate the art of being a drag queen from the practice of female impersonation comes from an argument commonly known as the statue and the clay . It appears in the works of Judith Jarvis Thomson and L.A. Paul, who—adapting some ideas from Aristotle’s Metaphysics —argue that a work of art, although it may in a sense depend on its material constituents, is not identical with them.

As the argument goes, suppose I purchase a piece of modelling clay at 9:00 A.M . and at 2:00 P.M . I fashion it into a fantastic likeness of mother Ru. I then place the statue of RuPaul on a pedestal. Intuitively, both the piece of clay and the statue of RuPaul are on the pedestal. Some philosophers think this means that the piece of clay and statue are really one and the same thing; the only thing that has changed about the clay is a difference in our description—now the clay is fabulous. Philosophers such as Thomson and Paul, however, argue that they are really different: the clay may constitute the statue of RuPaul but the statue is not identical to the piece of clay. It would, after all, be very peculiar to say that the statue of RuPaul existed at 9:00 A.M . prior to our sculpting the clay at 2:00 P.M . To bolster their argument, however, they add another example.

Suppose at 3:00 P.M . I accidentally bump into the pedestal and knock off the hand of the statue, which I then replace with a different piece of clay. Intuitively, it seems like the statue of RuPaul is still on the pedestal but the piece of clay, in its entirety, is not: a portion of it is lying on the floor. So, they argue, the statue of RuPaul cannot be equivalent to her material constituent, the clay, although the statue may in a sense depend on the clay for its existence. Maybe if we knocked off or replaced a larger part of the statue we might actually decide that RuPaul is not on the pedestal anymore after all—too much of her has been destroyed or changed. You could argue, for instance, whether All Stars 4 winner Trinity the Tuck can reasonably be classified as the same person she was a decade ago before most of her body was made of silicon. But the main takeaway from the statue and the clay is this: like the statue that survives the destruction and replacement of its hand, if we can show that a drag queen can survive having her wig literally snatched (or the other aspects of the art of being a drag queen we associate with femininity), perhaps we can show that female impersonation is not fundamental to the art of being a drag queen after all.

At first, it may seem an impossible task to snatch a queen’s wig—let alone her sequined dresses, heels, or makeup—but look a little closer and you’ll begin to realize that the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race actually revel in flouting the visual conventions of drag we associate with femininity.

The glamorous Season Nine winner, Sasha Velour, is best known for her unapologetically bald head (besides her bold and graphic style). Ongina from Season One is also a bald queen. Even when it’s not a regular part of her visual style, a queen will occasionally showcase her dome for a look, like Bob the Drag Queen’s fabulous neon queen realness runway from Season Eight, Episode 4, or Sharon Needles’s devastatingly dark post-apocalyptic couture from Season Four, Episode 1.

But the flouting of femininity doesn’t end with wigs. In Season Six, Episode 2, Milk was the first queen to wear facial hair on the cat walk, donning a white goatee for her Party Supply drag. Facial hair makes a strong comeback, however, in the Bearded and Beautiful runway from Season Seven, Episode 3, where all the queens sported various styles of facial hair, giving us such iconic looks as Katya Zamolodchikova’s Babe-raham Lincoln and Max’s Salvador Dali dominatrix.

Queens like Trixie Mattel and Nina Bo’Nina Brown have also done some pretty wild things with makeup. As Trixie herself has said, she doesn’t just paint for the back row, she paints “for the check-cashing place down the street” and her style is often described as clown-like. Nina, who is also a true talent with a brush, produces make-up effects of the sort you’d be more likely to see on the set of a sci-fi film than in a drag show, serving faces which have ranged from a grinning neon skull to a literal Georgia peach.

Not even the feminine silhouettes and sequined dresses that we’ve come to associate so fondly with the art of being a drag queen are sacred. The fierce winners of both Season Three and Season Ten, Raja and Aquaria, are well known for deserting the padding, breast plates, and corsets to rock the “boy bod” and our queens have not infrequently donned unisex or male apparel. Sasha slayed in a dinosaur onesie at the Season Nine reunion and tuxedos cross-seasonally have been a particular favorite. Some challenges such as the bride groom photoshoot challenge from Season Two, Episode 5, and the Half Man Half Woman runway of Season Seven, Episode 10, even required the studly formal wear.

All this is not to say that women can’t wear tuxedos, or be bald, or that these things can’t be feminine. There most certainly are women who work it that way. There are conventions though, regardless of their basis, and bald is not a conventionally feminine look—especially not in the context of drag queendom, which loves its bedazzled evening gowns and a good old hair-sprayed-to-high-heaven pageant wig that would make Dolly Parton proud.

Just as the statue of RuPaul continued to exist after her hand was shattered, it appears you can snatch a queen’s wig without destroying her status as a drag queen. But is this enough to show that the practice of female impersonation is not at the heart of this art form?

While our queens do enjoy defying our expectations when it comes to the visual conventions of drag associated with femininity, they seem to do so selectively: Sasha is a bald queen, but she still wears cherry bomb lipstick and dresses worthy of Milan’s fashion week. Nina may paint her face like other-worldly sci-fi creations, but she still cinches her waist and jiggles her breast-plate on the runway. Maybe, you could argue, a queen doesn’t need to adhere to all these conventions, but to continue to be a queen she must adhere to some . Further, the examples here only address the visual conventions, but the art of being a drag queen is really properly a performance art .

As RuPaul herself frequently emphasizes, the true merit of a queen lies in her “creativity, uniqueness, nerve and talent.” Cheeky acronym aside, the latter refers not only to a queen’s ability to turn a fierce look, but to pull off a sick death-drop mid lip sync, to devise deliciously salty comebacks, and to be, more broadly speaking, an artist, comedian, and entertainer who commands the attention of an audience.

There is, then, more than one way to portray femininity, even if its visual aspects are the most obvious. This is exemplified in Season Three, Episode 7, when the contestants had to pose for a nude photo shoot and Mother Ru told them that “a drag queen needs to be able to serve Womana even when she is stripped of her wigs, padding and things of that nature.” The queens were permitted to wear only light make-up for the shoot, though Shangela opted out entirely, effectively eliminating all the feminine visual conventions we typically associate with drag in this particular instance. Nonetheless, there is something about the body language in her portrait that truly conveys femininity. So, you might argue, to truly separate the art of being a drag queen from the practice of female impersonation you would need an example where you remove a queen entirely from both the visual and performative aspects of drag that we associate with femininity. Luckily, Drag Race provides.

In Season Ten, Episode 10, RuPaul introduces a mini challenge in which the queens must create a “super macho character” and participate in a photoshoot advertising a fictitious body spray, Trade. They subsequently don plaid, work boots, ripped T-shirts, and facial hair and, during the photoshoot, show off their muscles, summon the deepest voices they can possibly muster and behave, in general, like super manly men.

In this example, we see not only no feminine visual conventions or performative mannerisms (beyond cracking jokes in reference to the seemingly contradictory nature of these new manly personas), but they actually do the exact opposite of what we’ve come to expect a drag queen to do: they perform masculinity. Significantly, this isn’t the only occasion in the context of RuPaul’s Drag Race in which our queens have done this.

During their time together on Season Six, Milk and Gia Gunn had their catty moments. While Milk, the first queen to wear facial hair, pushed at the conventional boundaries of drag performance on RuPaul’s runway, Gia, a trans queen coming from a perspective of self-realization, was insistent on drag being about femininity and “fishiness,” even expressing contempt for “manly queens” (a direct jab at Milk who has described herself this way). We see the visual culmination of their disagreement in Season Six, Episode 5, during the Night of a Thousand Ru’s runway. While Gia and all the other queens strutted their stuff in various reiterations of RuPaul’s iconic drag style characterized by enormous wigs and fitted floor-length mermaid dresses, Milk shocked the audience and the judges by prancing down the catwalk as workroom RuPaul, complete with bald head, garish suit and blocky glasses. The end of the episode, in a sense, settled their dispute. RuPaul, acting as the final arbiter, sent Gia Gunn home while Milk lived to slay another day.

Strikingly similar to the macho photo shoot of Season Ten there was also a mini challenge in the third episode of All Stars 1, where Ru asks the queens to snap a sexy selfie serving “butch male realness.” Once again the queens, despite their endless barrage of jokes about the seemingly contradictory nature of this practice or their inability to work male convincingly, don their best guy apparel and perform masculinity.

Finally, in Season Seven, Episode 7, to no obvious detriment to her success, Kennedy Davenport broke with convention when she portrayed famous singer Little Richard for the snatch game. She, along with Ginger Minj, went on to win the challenge. All this being said, does performing masculinity really suffice to separate the art of being a drag queen from the practice of female impersonation?

One clear objection you could make here which has been made by philosophers of art in some form or another before is to the necessity of accepting these performances as characterizing works in the art of being a drag queen. You could, for instance, argue that generally drag queens are captured as works in an art form practice that essentially involves female impersonation and a few marginal examples are not enough to toss out a theory that is, as a whole, successful at capturing the body of works in its canon.

As Dennis Dutton complains, art theorists, in their obsessive attempts to try to account for problematic outliers like Duchamp’s urinal or other works of avant-garde art, have ignored the center of art and its chief values. In other words, they are exceptions to the rule and not the rule. As other philosophers including Dominic Lopes and Noel Carroll have countered, however, these so-called “marginal cases” could just as well be thought of as justifiably shaking up our misplaced confidence in traditional theories or art, or in this case, our traditional conceptions about what it is to be a drag queen that we thought to be true only because our samples were biased.

A related and perhaps stronger objection here is to deny that these performances are works in the art of being a drag queen at all . To see this, consider the following scenario: suppose I create a work of art that begins as a liquid but will eventually harden to form a sculpture. While in its liquid form it seems we could classify it as a work of performance art (assuming “inanimate objects doing stuff” is equivalent to an artist’s performance), while after it is hardened we could call it a sculpture. Similarly, it seems that a performer could be classified as both a drag queen and a drag king at different times. That is, what blocks us from simply saying that in these examples, our queens, though they may be on RuPaul’s Drag Race , aren’t performing as drag kings ? Biological women and trans women, after all, though much rarer, can perform as drag queens, so why not suppose that biological or trans men can also perform as drag kings?

To respond to this objection we will need a strong reason to prefer classifying these butch male realness examples as works in the art of being a drag queen.

In an amusing paper called Unperformable Works and the Ontology of Music , Wesley D. Cray argues that there are some musical works for performance that may be unperformable, such as A&~A , in which a musician plays an A on a kazoo and simultaneously refrains from playing any note on that same kazoo. In form and notation it is a logical contradiction and, as a speech act, an invalid request—I can tell you to perform A and not-A but you would not be able to do this, it is impossible. So there are some musical works for performance that are intentionally not performable.

There is something peculiar and maybe a little contradictory about classifying an unperformable work as a work for performance, but Cray thinks we are right to do so because the foundation of our interest and enjoyment of unperformable works like A&~A actually hinges on this humorous contradiction. Similarly, I think that the primary enjoyment we get out of drag performances such as the manly photoshoot, butch male realness selfies, Milk’s workroom RuPaul and Kennedy’s Little Richard only makes sense if we continue to think of the contestants not suddenly as drag kings but, enduringly, as drag queens. If our queens ceased to be queens in this moment the performance wouldn’t be half as funny as it is.

One objection you could make here would be to argue that although our drag queens may continue to be drag queens, the super macho photoshoot is only funny in light of the fact that the practice of female impersonation is a convention of drag. In other words, the enjoyable oddity of Aquaria or Eureka doing an impression of a brawny guy rests on our familiarity with them being drag queens when the art form is characterized by the practice of female impersonation.

As philosophers including Cray, Stephen Davies, Gianluca Consoli, and Julian Dodd have variously argued, however, just because works of performance art may in a sense depend on their action constituents (as art works in a sense depend on their material constituents), this does not make them identical to the latter and the conventions of these performances may not be fundamental to a theory of them. For example, if you were living in Elizabethan England during the time of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, it was a convention of plays from this period that they are always performed by men. But as we can see retrospectively, this convention has changed. Sometimes it’s the most outlandish performances that do better to bring the ontological boundaries of an art form, or what makes an art form precisely what it is, into focus.

Of course, you could argue that this is not a good enough analogy to make. Unlike the convention of plays being performed only by men, the convention of female impersonation has remained stable throughout the history of the art of being a drag queen exempting only a few marginal examples of butch male realness. Not to acknowledge this would be ridiculous. We still need an explanation of the fact that drag queens are, for the most part, men dressed in women’s clothing and the best explanation of this is that female impersonation is characteristic practice of the art of being a drag queen.

An alternate explanation you could give here is that of historical contingency. That the art of being a drag queen is predominantly practiced by men dressed like women could be analogous to the fact that a graduation is a ceremony predominantly attended by graduates wearing grad regalia. You don’t need to wear grad regalia at a graduation to be a graduate. Similarly, you don’t need to be a man wearing women’s clothing to be considered a drag queen—these are just arbitrary historical conventions.

An opponent might object further, however, that this new analogy erroneously separates female impersonation from the appreciative practices that feature centrally in the way that drag is produced and consumed. It may be true that graduates typically wear and are expected to wear grad regalia at their graduations, but their clothes play no role in our assessment of them as graduates. In contrast, the fact that drag queens typically are and are expected to be men dressed like women does play a central role in our assessment of their performance as drag queens and the art practice through which the drag queen is brought into existence.

While it may be true that female impersonation is the practice through which the art of being a drag queen or individual drag personas are or were brought into existence, and often features heavily into our appreciation of drag queens, this still does not mean that female impersonation must be the characteristic practice of the drag queen’s art. It is entirely possible to appreciate some aspect of a work of art that is a convention of the art form to which it belongs while holding that such a convention may not be fundamental to that particular art form. Consider the following: paper—like drag, on the understanding with which we began—is an ordinary phenomenon which comes to constitute a work of art when the process of folding it in particular way elevates it to art status. Specifically, it is a work in the art of origami. Subsequently, paper is the conventional medium of origami, featuring in its origins and in our appreciation of works of origami—we can acknowledge the beauty of the paper from which a work of origami is made.

Once the art of origami has been established, however, it can have instances in which paper plays no immediate role—we could instead use malleable metal or plastic. The relationship between the craft of paper making and the art of origami nonetheless continues to be an essential one, even if there are instances of origami rendered in metal or plastic in which no paper is involved.

It’s the same with the relationship between the craft of female impersonation and the art of the drag queen. Female impersonation features in the origins and conventions of the art of being a drag queen just as paper does in the art of origami. Further, the good drag queen may employ beautiful female impersonation, just as good origami may be done with beautiful paper, but using paper need not be the characteristic practice of origami and female impersonation need not be the characteristic practice of the drag queen’s art. Origami can be made with metal or plastic and a drag queen can perform butch male realness.

A final, related objection is that even if no statue is identical to the clay it is comprised of, it remains true that sculpture is essentially the art of making representative forms using carving, casting, or other shaping techniques. That is, the relation of the drag queen to an instance of female impersonation might not be identity, but it can still be true that drag is essentially the art of female impersonation. While I think this is correct, I believe there is a useful difference between sculpture and drag in the context of the macho photoshoot and other examples of butch male realness, which actually works in our favor to put this objection to rest.

In the case of the statue and the clay, we are merely removing or replacing one piece of clay with another piece of clay—rightly, this shouldn’t affect our definition of sculpting. In the macho photoshoot, however, we are not merely swapping out one aspect of female impersonation for another: we have effectively eliminated it all together and replaced it with something entirely different while maintaining the intuition that our fierce contestants have not forfeited their status as drag queens. This is more like having the intuition that we should classify a painting as a sculpture. Although it sounds a little silly, if we genuinely had that intuition, we should probably rethink what is or is not essential to sculpture to accommodate it, or, as it were, what is or isn’t essential to the art of being a drag queen.

If female impersonation is not the characteristic practice of the art of being a drag queen, we are left to ask: what is? Well, in Kendall Walton’s famous book, Mimesis as Make Believe , he suggests that one of the fundamental components of any representational artwork, that is, any art that depicts something as opposed to nothing, is pretense , which here means something like imitation, pretend, or make-believe. For example, Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room in Saint-Rémy de Provence in France just before sunset. It isn’t literally the view, but we pretend that it is and so it is in the fictional world of the representation.

This insight allows us to narrow our question a little bit. Drag is a representational art—it depicts something —and if Walton is correct and all representational arts essentially involve pretense, what are we pretending a drag queen to be when she invites us to engage in this act of pretense? Is there some common thread of make believe that can unite more conventional drag performances and the macho photoshoot that isn’t female impersonation?

I was first introduced to Drag Race during the second season of All Stars by my insistent friends Sarah and Richard, and I knew so little about it that I thought I had signed up for a literal drag race. Imagine my surprise at seeing Katya, Detox, and Alaska strut into the work room—instead of cars, I was served eleganza extravaganza. As I was rapidly inducted into the drag empire of RuPaul, however, a thought dawned on me: despite what I thought I knew about drag queens and the language we use to talk about them, they didn’t actually remind me of any women I knew, not even in the sense of being exaggerated versions of them—they really reminded me more of the 1800s playwright, Oscar Wilde.

Something not many people know about Wilde is that he is often credited as being the first modern celebrity because he was famous before he had a substantial literary reputation. Wherever he went, he made himself the center of attention by spouting witticisms and charming or offending people left and right with his sharp tongue and many eccentricities, not unlike a drag queen. And it’s this, I think, that is the golden thread we need to stitch conventional drag performances and the macho photoshoot together.

Whatever a drag queen happens to impersonate, from the most fabulous fashion diva to the manliest man, the persona she takes on always shines with a light that’s a little bigger and a little brighter than an ordinary person’s—that is, she always impersonates celebrity . This is perhaps easiest to see when you consider the people drag queens usually cite as their inspiration. These are not average individuals, but only the most famous of the famous: Madonna, Cher, Diana Ross, Grace Jones, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears.

To clarify, by impersonating celebrity I don’t mean any particular celebrity, even though there are drag queens like Derrick Barry and Chad Michaels who do this; I mean that they present themselves as the proper targets of inauthentic adoration—to be beloved and renowned in the same way as a celebrity is without the preconditions of a real celebrity’s rise to stardom. This isn’t to say that drag queens can’t be celebrities—that would obviously be preposterous. What I’m saying is, even before a drag queen achieves the celebrity status of RuPaul or the contestants on her show, we still expect her to act like a celebrity, worthy of our adoration, wherever and whenever she performs her larger than life persona. If she fails to convince us of this, we would think that she was failing, in a sense, to act like a drag queen.

One perfect example of this failure to perform comes from Jaymes Mansfield, the sweet but meek queen eliminated in the first episode of Season Nine seemingly owing to her on-camera nervousness. There was nothing wrong with her female impersonation—she served just as much womana as any of the other queens. She didn’t, however, live up to the bold stage presence the judges or the audience expected her to have and it cost her a place among the top four.

Subsequently, conceptualizing the impersonation of celebrity as fundamental to the practice of the art of being a drag queen beneficially helps us to make sense not only of those examples of butch male realness but of the importance, as Mama Ru puts it, of a queen’s creativity, uniqueness, nerve and talent. What better way, after all, to make your audience complicit in the fiction of celebrity you’re performing than by having genuine talents like acting, comedy, singing, dancing, lip-syncing, or clothing design that will really make you the center of attention on a stage? Indeed, these other aspects actually seem to be a necessity in the context of Drag Race at this point because its queens must go above and beyond in every new season to keep things fresh and interesting for a viewership that has become accustomed to seeing drag queens.

It isn’t enough anymore just to be a person wearing glittery clothing on stage: drag queens must do more to differentiate themselves, to be unique—otherwise, they cease to be worthy of their audience’s attention.

Some might consider a theory of the art of being a drag queen characterized as the impersonation of celebrity a radical theory, and while it certainly differs from our folk concepts of drag queens, hopefully, after walking you through it, it doesn’t sound so crazy after all. You might be left to wonder, though, will this theory have any effect on drag queens or on RuPaul’s Drag Race ? The answer, I think, is a resounding no.

Our beloved queens will likely still call each other bitches, wear gag-worthy outfits, work the runway in six-inch heels, and do everything else we live to see them do. The theory does predict, however, that these glam-tastic artists will, in the future, probably continue to defy the conventions of drag we associate with female impersonation, and perhaps with increasing frequency, as each new season of contestants tries to hold our attention in the game of superstar make-believe, and outdo the last.