Core Response #3 - Larcom

When it came to this week's readings, I was specifically interested in the Strings & Bui piece about RuPaul's Drag Race—possibly because I'm relatively familiar with the show myself. As such, I am also familiar with the phenomenon this piece discusses with regards to the show: the specific racialized performance of femininity it demands of its contestants, and how this performance bumps up against the phenomenon of supposed "realness." 

With regards to Drag Race, the show hinges on the understanding that drag—gender—is a constructed performance while insisting on an equally constructed, performative racial "realness" from its Black and brown queens. The ironies abound when the supposed "realness" the show rewards is grounded mainly in outlandish racial stereotypes and caricatures. The couching of this demand under the term of "personality" is doubly problematic: personality is the essential, core characteristics that define how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. Your personality is who you are.  By referring to racial caricaturizing as personality, the show seems to imply some sort of a reality to the racial spectacle a queen of color presents on the show. Race is presented as fixed and immutable while gender can be malleable and performative, despite the fact that race is also a construction. 

Drag Race is also very interesting when it comes to the layers of reality it inhabits. Drag is by its very nature a performance, and the weekly challenges presented to the contestants are always a challenge of performance as well. How well can you put on the costume of—or embody the judges' vision of—a (racialized) female character? The "reality" show is predicated on the performed and inauthentic, yet continues to demand and insist upon a supposed authenticity. The reality of it perhaps comes from the acknowledgement of its own performance and constructedness, the peeling back of the curtain, but when the show's very fabric relies on the outrageous performed spectacle, even the "talking-head" interviews that are supposedly reality take on a sort of meta-awareness of their own unreality. 

Other contest reality shows with similar setups (American Idol, Project Runway, all those Food Network cooking competitions) seem to have less awareness of their actual unreality, or at least seem less likely to acknowledge it—although I think much of this is down to the very nature of what drag performance is. Regardless, I find it very interesting that the reality show that seems the most acutely aware of its own non-reality and constructed nature is also the one most consistently and most straightforwardly demanding a false "realness" from its contestants.