part0026

When Michelle Visage raises and wiggles her finger to tell a drag queen on Drag Race to “Stop relying on that body,” we know this drag queen is in trouble. Most likely, she’s been coasting by for a few episodes, trusting that her amazing body will push her over the edge to be safe for yet another episode while doing just mediocre in the main challenges. She better werk!

This imperative can also be found in a group on Facebook named “Fire WERK With Me.” This group combines content from the legendary TV series Twin Peaks with RuPaul’s Drag Race to create memes that are taking up inside jokes, references and other subcultural lingo to create a unique sub-sub-cultural group with its own linguistic conventions that must appear obscure to outsiders.

As a quick refresher, or for those who don’t know: The Twin Peaks television series is a cult classic, created by David Lynch, that ran for three seasons—two in the Nineties and a third in 2018. The purported plot of the show revolves around finding out who killed teenage homecoming queen Laura Palmer, but this is also just a thin cover to launch other kinds of surreal drama and weirdness in typical Lynch fashion: hello, evil Doppelgängers that speak backwards and characters getting trapped inside drawers’ handles.

Fire WERK With Me is a combined reference to both shows. So the “werk” comes from Drag Race , of course, and the rest is a play on Fire Walk with Me , the title of the Twin Peaks prequel.

As a fantastically loud and proud LGBTQ+ show, RuPaul’s Drag Race has opened the door of drag, LGBTQ+, and black culture for a mainstream audience. It has opened the door of the conventions, habits, rituals and attitudes of these subcultures to the mainstream public.

Before social media took over the cultural commentary, only journalists and experts were allowed to have a say on popular culture. Now viewers don’t only evaluate and critique their favourite shows—they interact with them through their comments and, most importantly, through viral content creation.

Fire WERK With Me sees this content creation, subcultural language and shade appear in one artifact: the Facebook group features memes, gifs, and videos that are exclusively fan-made, and that contain a type of language and humor that only members of that subculture would be able to understand.

Because in groups like Fire WERK with Me, conveniently hosted on Facebook to allow moderators to keep the conversation shady without cruelty, modern pop culture is created daily before our eyes, quicker than you can say “Eleganza Extravaganza!”

RuPaul’s Drag Race promised to turn the talent competition rules upside down, bringing a dragged up, gayer version of the American dream to the small screen. The show is a competition amongst drag queens who compete before the eyes of the original “Supermodel of the World,” RuPaul, for prizes and for the title of America’s next drag superstar.

RuPaul’s Drag Race’s secret seems to be its combination of successful reality TV elements such as make-overs, guest stars, and drama between characters, with its unique selling point: the fact that its contestants are not wannabe top models, but drag queens with their own hilarious and dramatic stories.

Sharing drag language with the world and including outsiders in inside jokes, slang and gags, RuPaul’s Drag Race opened the subcultural world of drag to the wider universe. The contestants “read”—jokingly criticize—each other in the WERK room or in challenges, adding an element of shade to fan’s perception of the show.

The subculture is a sociological concept often applied in the context of criminological studies. In the dawn of sociology, before even RuPaul and Michelle Visage were born (can you imagine?), subcultures were seen as a deviation from traditional culture and were initially studied in relation to deviant and criminal groups. The idea of subculture was often con nected to gangs and juvenile delinquency, and saw a particular group of ‘outcasts’ rejecting social norms by creating some of their own. Now, the “sub” in “subculture” has stopped being derogatory: it is just a part of a whole—the whole being mainstream culture.

Being part of a subculture can simply mean that you’re different, turning a once infamous definition of a scarier, uglier group of boogers into more supportive Heathers: a community that helps underdogs fashion their identity. In RuPaul’s Drag Race terms, the show itself and drag as a practice have helped some contestants, such as Gia Gunn or Carmen Carrera, better understand themselves. Some gay men and trans women need this subcultural space to turn themselves into queens because if you can’t love yourself, how are you going to love anybody else?

Moving on from being marginal, often deviant groups within society, subcultures have become the runway on which our cultural evolution sashays. Subcultures influence those who take part in them, turning them from consumers to producers, from Drag Race spectators to the next drag superstars—I see you, Aquaria and Naomi Smalls!

This creation of a supportive space is without a doubt present in RuPaul’s Drag Race as a show, starting from RuPaul’s history of fighting for gay rights and moving onto the queens’ own dramatic stories. Although not immune from controversies within the LGBTQ+ community, RuPaul’s Drag Race gives space to performers outside the mainstream, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, enacting RuPaul’s view that drag crushes male-dominated culture more than a lip sync assassin. In other words, as RuPaul famously said on the show in 2013: “Every time I bat my false eyelashes, it’s a political statement!”

We can apply the concepts and language of subcultures to fandoms. Like drag queens, online fandoms have a specific language and perform specific activities that are unique to that fandom, making the word ‘fandom’ itself almost synonymous with ‘online media subculture.’

The increase in popularity of social networks has changed the way fans interact with entertainment. Pearson describes the Internet and digitalisation’s impact on fandom as “convergence culture,” or when fan interactions become crucial to how a show operates. You can just watch RuPaul’s Drag Race if you like, but many viewers live for Untucked afterward to gag at RuPaul’s Drag Race’s goings on behind the scenes. And online, we gag as a family all under the wing of Mama Ru.

Social networks are essentially a giant fandom interactive library waiting for you inside your phone—or, if you’re a drag queen or drag fan, they’re a drag school of life taught through your social media. They don’t only help fans build communities around a show—Valentina fans, BenDeLaChrist worshippers—but they also give new fans years’ worth of information about things Lady Bunny, Pepper Labeija, and other pre-Drag Race royalty have done. A whole lot of visibility is being created and shared in content breaking international boundaries and forming communities that would not have existed before Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Language is a key aspect of subcultural behavior and aggregation, and if you don’t believe me all you have to do is ask Miz Cracker: “Vanjie is like gay aloha: it’s hello, goodbye, and thank you,” she said in Season Ten’s “Reunited” episode. Because nothing embodies the easily identifiable power of RuPaul’s Drag Race ’s special breed of subcultural language as much as “Vanjie. Vaaaaanjie !”: middle name of Vanessa ‘Vanjie’ Mateo, the first eliminated queen from Season Ten who wasn’t ready to leave and decided to go out with a bang—or rather, by oddly sashaying away backwards screaming her own middle name. Talk about making an exit! A meme, a catchphrase, a war cry every RuPaul’s Drag Race fan will recognize, ‘Vanjie’ is a clear example of how subcultural language plays out in RuPaul’s Drag Race .

The show’s language borrows a great deal from the New York drag scene documentary Paris Is Burning , depicting the origins and meanings behind drag balls, vogueing, shade and reading. However, the whole show is built on repeating catch-phrases and making words up. These are often Mama Ru’s (and Mama knows, hence the #shitRuPaulsays mini challenge!), but they are also coined by contestants and other judges: Shangela’s ‘Halleloo’ salute which I’m pretty sure that, after three seasons, has even reached alien satellites; Pearl’s ‘Flazedà’ outfit description that not even Pearl herself was able to fully explain; Michelle Visage ‘Eloguent,’ a mistaken runway judgment now turned into an actual compliment; ‘No T No Shade,’ the inevitable prequel to saying something shady, but true, because it’s not shady if it’s the T (the truth).

On RuPaul’s Drag Race , language has many functions. R. Moore has argued that “linguistic drag” is used by contestants and creators in RuPaul’s Drag Race to construct and perform gender identity. N. De Villiers adds to this that drag speak also has an educational value, bringing drag into the wider debate to discuss gender, identity and sexuality, opening the discourse to non-LGBTQ+ audiences.

In this sense, RuPaul’s Drag Race displays aspects of modern meta-linguism, too, because on the show, language is created, discussed, modified, explained. Linguistics identify the various functions of language, with the meta-lingual function used to agree on the definition of a term. By agreeing on the definition of the terms used, RuPaul’s Drag Race creates and shares its “drag slang” with the world, both through wrap-up reunion episodes that explain the language created during seasons and simply through behind-the-scenes talks and runaway commentary, making RuPaul’s Drag Race and drag language bleed into everyday discussions and pop culture.

Language on RuPaul’s Drag Race therefore assumes multiple functions: that of subcultural speech, but also that of educational means for letting the viewer in on drag slang, which has been heavily explained and commented on during the show and subsequently adopted by pop culture.

The Internet has given fans of any show the ultimate space to come together and discuss their favorite type of entertainment, so much so that you could spend hours down the rabbit hole of fan-made videos or fiction. Yet, each social networking platform—and even different topics within and corners of that platform—hosts different subcultures presenting different characteristics and using distinctive language, with each platform using different tones, memes and jokes that can only be understood by members of that subculture.

Enter RuPaul’s Drag Race , the show responsible for some of the Internet’s fiercest memes, a factory that sees the show’s fandom and non-watchers alike ‘werk’ to create original Drag Race –inspired content in the form of memes, gifs, and videos.

Meme and content creation among members of a particular subculture can be highly performative, an attribute that can be linked to drag as a performance and as a form of entertainment. After all, queens like Ivy Winters (Ivyyyyyyyy Wiiiiiinteeeerrrrs), Kennedy Davenport, and Joslyn Fox respectively told Buzzfeed in 2015 that they see drag as creativity, freedom of expression, and being yourself—so why shouldn’t fans add their quirks and passions onto their RuPaul’s Drag Race content? Inevitably, with a highly entertaining show featuring performative characteristics, its online community and followers and the content originating from their subcultural groups will present key quirks and elements of RuPaul’s Drag Race ’s offline appeal, in a symbiotic relationship between mainstream culture and online media subcultures.

If we understand reality as what plays before our eyes, the dimension and life we inhabit—and if we understand reality television as a mediated portrayal of that reality—we can then see meta-reality, a philosophical subject developed by Jamie Morgan and Roy Bhaskar, as what is “beyond reality as currently understood” in our day and age.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a “meta” show. The show has been defined an example of meta-reality and meta-commentary for its constant reflection on and parodying of television, pop culture, and their tropes—and even of the show itself. RuPaul’s Drag Race is meta-reality because it subverts the rules of a variety of pop culture’s most popular entertainment, like America’s Next Top Model’s runway-based competitions or highly emotional reality shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians by swapping your average contestants or celebrities with drag queens, and by substituting the shows’ seriousness with gags and parodies. In an apt comparison, de Villiers likens Drag Race’s borrowing of language and sketches from drag ball scenes in the Paris Is Burning documentary to memeification, where culture is shared by fans all over the Internet.

Meta-reality is for de Villers a nod to the savvy fan, referring to elements of the show or of pop culture that only devoted RuPaul’s Drag Race and drag-culture consumers will know about—a bit like when Mama Ru brings the original henny Stacy Layne Matthews into All Stars 4 because you can only know her if you’ve watched the show all along.

Ronald N. Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley see media meta-commentary as a critical reflection about media practices and performances. For them, culture is at the center of meta-commentary. The meta-commentary then becomes a performance itself, giving birth to a new form of expert. RuPaul’s Drag Race fans are the ultimate meta-commentators, fashioning themselves as the experts and reviewers. And they are doing so because today, through social media, they have the power to create fan-inspired, shareable content. In inserting themselves into the creative process, the audiences perform RuPaul’s Drag Race traditions themselves, adopting a similar tone and language and creating new content as a result.

“Shade is, I don’t tell you you’re ugly, but I don’t have to tell you, because you know you’re ugly. And that’s shade,” said Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning , in a definition developed by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as a “subtle, sneering expression of contempt or disgust.”

Through RuPaul’s Drag Race , shade has evolved, becoming playful and taking over the drag world and beyond. From benevolent reading of other queens at the hands of secretly nice Bianca Del Rio to the whole Farrah Moan/Valentina fan drama, shade is a key element of fans’ and contestants’ behavior online—and it becomes crucial in one of the weirdest corners of the internet, the Drag Race and Twin Peaks mash-up Facebook group Fire WERK with Me.

Twin Peaks is a ground-breaking, genre-bending TV show, displaying a surrealistic blend of comedy and pathos. Hailed as the show that changed television, the popular American TV series was created by David Lynch and Mark Frost in the early 1990s, focusing on how the mystery surrounding homecoming queen Laura Palmer’s death breaks up a small town. The show gained a cult fandom despite having been canceled after only two seasons, with a third highly anticipated season, The Return , aired in 2018. Like RuPaul’s Drag Race , the show quickly became iconic. However, contrarily to RuPaul’s Drag Race, Twin Peaks sees the shattering of the American dream into pure horror, although it sports a great deal of drama, overacting and identity creation, a surreal soap opera with a murder at its core. The show’s quirks have resulted in its own fully-fledged online media subculture, which was born at the dawn of the consumer-facing Internet to discuss theories on and questions about the show. At the time, fans used Usenet, established in 1980, to gain a deeper understanding and experience of the show, in what I would call a prequel to online fandom forums. Since then, Twin Peaks has had an internet revival, such as its own Facebook group “Fire Walk with Memes” and inordinate number of Reddit feeds and crossovers.

Fire WERK With Me is a meta-reality and meta-commentary Facebook group, where ‘Anus-thing’ is possible, where cult fandoms overlap “to share their fiercest crossover memes, unraveling the connections between Killer Bob and Bob the Drag Queen like it’s a goddamn Tibetan rock toss,” as Stegemoeller wrote for Paper Magazine in 2017. It follows continuous nods to the show by Drag Race contestants such as Trixie Mattel, Miz Cracker and, most of all, Katya Zamolodchikova, who wore a Twin Peaks inspired outfit featuring red glitter on the outside, and a chevron pattern of black and white on the inside, mirroring the decor of one of the most defining rooms of the series: the Black Lodge, where evil Doppelgängers trap their good counterparts from the outside world.

The group was created by Aaron Whitman, who saw Twin Peaks crossovers develop in other fan groups and decided to mash up the show with RuPaul’s Drag Race , due to both shows’ reliance on drama. The group now counts nearly ten thousand followers. Whitman says it grew during the “Golden Age of Fire WERK with Me,” or “2017, when Twin Peaks Season Three and Drag Race Season Nine were airing at the same time.”

I’ve already explained how fandoms are a new form of online media subculture, and crossover fandoms occupy a key niche of this Internet space. After all, drag queens and their followers can certainly be interested in other stuff besides drag. Fire WERK with Me is a subculture within subculture, uniting two cult shows aired (up until 2018’s The Return ) at two different times in history, connecting them with jokes, memes and gifs that will only be understood by people who watch both RuPaul’s Drag Race and Twin Peaks .

So what brings the two apparently incompatible premises of RuPaul’s Drag Race and Twin Peaks together in Fire WERK With Me? Its key elements are shade, shareability, and an understanding of both shows’ high potential for drama and weirdness. And just like RuPaul’s Drag Race , Fire WERK with Me has a penchant for meta-reality as meta-commentary, a fascination with the idea of the double and the repetition of catch-phrases.

The group plays on some of the salient, most dramatic moments of Twin Peaks and RuPaul’s Drag Race , making fun of the appearance, characteristics, and personalities of both drag queens and Twin Peaks characters. For instance, one of Fire WERK with Me’s most successful memes, shared in Paper Magazine , repurposed Alyssa Edwards’s “Girl, look how orange you fucking look” read toward Coco Montrese in a Twin Peaks: The Return key, making Alyssa say it to Kyle MacLachlan’s character—the evil, orange-tanned Doppelgänger of Agent Cooper, who stares at her with his trademark evil, not-bothered look that chills your bones more than Coco’s “I’m not joking, bitch!”

Memes like the one I have just described draw together one of the main similarities between the two shows: the idea of the Doppelgänger, the drag queen in and out of drag and good and bad Cooper in Twin Peaks . Originating from folklore and reprised during Victorian times, the figure of the Doppelgänger represents both sides of a character, the socially acceptable one and the dark, twisted one harbored by the character’s psyche. Performed playfully by drag queens and more dramatically in Twin Peaks , the idea of the Doppelgänger is re-enacted throughout Fire WERK with Me as a group joining two different realities, which are mediated and represented online.

The idea of the double is often shared in the group due to drag queens or contestants sometimes looking similar. We all know BenDeLaCrème is Michelle Visage’s good twin—bitch stole her look!—but on Fire WERK with Me, the two become tulpas, Twin Peaks doubles with an agenda created by evil Doppelgängers, as suggested through a meme by Margaret Cormier. In the split-screen meme, Michelle gives a single evil arched eyebrow look on one side and DeLa gives a comedic double-raised eyebrow look on the other side. They have basically the same hair and makeup, and the bold text joining the two images labels them “tulpa,” the paranormally generated double.

Another popular meme on the group uses the catch-phrase “Stop relying on that body,” created by a Facebook user called Jorriet Kiel. It’s an expression often used by RuPaul’s Drag Race judges to tell drag queens to work on more than just their looks, used in the meme to critique Twin Peaks ’s lengthy use of Laura Palmer’s death as a plot device to drive the show forward. Fire WERK with Me fans lay the catch-phrase over one of the opening scenes from Twin Peaks ’s pilot, depicting the iconic moment in which the local police find the girl’s body wrapped in plastic. To someone not familiar with Twin Peaks , the meme might appear to cross the line between fun and trolling. But fans will recognize that this body is the plot driver on which the show often leans very heavily, just like the queens competing in RuPaul’s Drag Race hope their tight tucks will give them the crown.

The use of “Stop relying on that body” shows another similarity between RuPaul’s Drag Race and Twin Peaks : recurring catch-phrases, repeated by Mama Ru and the queens on the show, and by characters such as Agent Cooper (“They have a cherry pie that’ll kill ya!”; “Damn fine coffee and a cherry pie”) on Twin Peaks . Imagine how excited the group was at seeing Naomi Smalls’s crazed all-American housewife look sporting a burnt cherry pie in All Stars 4 !

Queens and Twin Peaks actors receive the same treatment in the group: an all T, all shade play on their looks or actions. A fan juxtaposed Sharon Needles’s meme—depicting a generic cartoon queen from RuPaul’s Drag Race with standard lips and then a queen for All Stars with botoxed lips—with Twin Peaks actress Lara Flynn Boyle in the original Nineties series and in 2018’s The Return , after she indulged in some plastic surgery herself.

Whether the memes cross the line of sensitivity or not, they are an undeniable example of fan content creation and of meta-commentary on a show that is already meta-commentary in itself. If RuPaul’s Drag Race often features reading challenges, it is only fair that groups such as Fire WERK With Me would present similar forms of entertainment translated into online commentary, because being able to make fun of oneself and to accept pertinent, witty criticism is a key part of RuPaul’s Drag Race .

In Fire WERK with Me, shade means that users don’t have to tell others that a queen is annoying, or that a joke didn’t land, because they all know that already; it doesn’t incorporate the disgust element played out by Dorian Corey in Paris Is Burning , because it becomes commentary on the shows. Shade in the group isn’t trolling, it doesn’t become insensitive, because users—and contestants themselves—are supposed to know whether jokes or looks worked or not … unless they’re Valentina. Then they probably don’t.

Most importantly, Fire WERK with Me is an example of meta-commentary that tries to make sense of subcultures and realities that are still highly subcultural and sometimes distant and nonsensical to outsiders: those of drag and Twin Peaks , a show that can be fully understood only if you are its director, David Lynch. So just like if you are not a drag queen, a drag fan, or if you haven’t caught up with Untucked , you might struggle to understand why Shangela doesn’t need a sugar daddy, or what’s wrong with Valentina looking beautiful, like a model, just like Linda Evangelista; you might also not fully grasp why Twin Peaks: The Return features a scene where someone sweeps the floor for three minutes. That’s where groups of this kind come in handy: Fire WERK with Me’s shade has an educational and interpretational value.

Fire WERK with Me’s media content and posts have become so popular they were covered in the likes of Paper Magazine and Dazed , and they churn out memes as soon as a new RuPaul’s Drag Race, All Stars , or a Twin Peaks episode comes out to point out the fun, awkwardness and exaggerated dramatic flair of both shows, creating a sub-subculture in an already hyper-subcultural fandom.

And it looks like they’re not alone—last year, RuPaul’s Drag Race did a crossover episode with America’s Next Top Model and the Church of BenDeLaChrist is currently taking over Tumblr, while Mama Ru’s appearance on Jeopardy and Sasha Velour’s obsession with Riverdale have left fans begging for new show mash-ups. Fan blogs are calling for a RuPaul’s Drag Race/ American Horror Story crossover, while more obscure Reddit feeds hope for a Disney/ RuPaul’s Drag Race mash-up or for a RuPaul’s Drag Race/Mamma Mia crossover.