Niall Brennan

David Gudelunas

This book identifies and analyzes the ways in which RuPaul’s Drag Race has reshaped the visibility of drag culture in the US and internationally, as well as how the program has changed understandings of reality TV. This edited volume illustrates how drag has become a significant aspect of LGBTQ experience and identity globally through RuPaul’s Drag Race, and how the show has reformed a media landscape in which competition and reality itself are understood as given. Taking on lenses addressing race, ethnicity, geographical origin, cultural identity, physicality and body image, and participation in drag culture across the globe, this volume offers critical, non-traditional, and first-hand perspectives on drag culture.

The Boundaries of Reality TV

RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture

This volume explores drag in global online spaces as a distinct departure from the established success, and limitations, of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Centered around discourses of LGBTQ+ visibility and political mobilization, the book addresses how these discourses have moved beyond the increasingly limited qualities of the television series to reconfigure the parameters of drag in emerging communities and spaces. By reconceiving of drag in new settings, this volume uncovers the crucial social and political potential for community-building in an increasingly fragmented and isolated global space. Chapters by a diverse team of authors delve into the recognition of new articulations of LGBTQ+ visibility and political mobility through drag in online space; the implications of drag celebrity for issues such as labor and profit in the digital sphere; the (re)appropriation of mainstream drag in emerging online environments and communities; and the reverberations of drag in underrepresented and under-researched areas of the world. Offering new insights into the rise of drag in a global digital public sphere, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of media studies, cultural studies, digital media and cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, queer theory, film, and television studies.

Queer Visibility, Online Discourse and Political Change

Drag in the Global Digital Public Sphere

In modern-day America, newspaper advice columns have become public forums for the discussion of human sexuality. Although questions posed to newspaper advice columnists ranges from matters of etiquette to intimacy, as they have for decades, increasingly most of the limited space in these newspaper features address issues that fall under a broader heading of sexuality. Questions about marital fidelity, dating and relationships, sexual practices, gender roles, and sexual taboos have all become "hot button" topics within the morally conservative mainstream press. In Confidential to America, David Gudelunas shows how, since the 1950s, advice columns have been one of the few consistent, mainstream, and widely available public forums for the discussion of topics severely restricted in other places.Newspaper advice columns serve as sites of discussion about sexuality within a larger culture that is severely divided on questions of how, when, and to what extent one may formally speak about sexuality. Even now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, high schools remain hesitant to devote more than a semester or two to formal discussions of sexuality. When they do, under current governmental policy and pressure, these discussions are often restricted to abstinence-only programs or what might be described as "non-discussions" of sexuality. Community-based sexual education programs are similarly restricted in their reach, funding, and, more often than not, effectiveness. In America in the twenty-first century, talking about sex in educational contexts is perceived to be almost as risky as having sex.Gudelunas demonstrates that while formal discussions of sexuality are strictly regulated and often thwarted, the informal curriculum of sexuality, particularly in the American mass media, has become ever more vocal on the topic of sex. From depictions conveyed through fictional and reality-based popular culture, to discussions taking place in the cafeteria (if not the classroom) and in Internet chat rooms, sexuality dominates our collective conscience.

David Gudelunas

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