Work That Body by Jamie Hakim;

Author:Jamie Hakim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786604439
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2019-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

RuPaul’s Drag Race Body Transformation Tutorials: Drag Queens and Digital Capitalism

In the previous two chapters we looked at the emergence of two new digitally mediated male body practices that have emerged as responses to historical conditions created by post-2008 neoliberalism. In both cases I argued that men were making their bodies visible in ways historically associated with women, as a means of creating (limited) value in contexts where the means to create more enduring forms of value had been eroded for all, except global elites. In this chapter I look at another feminising digitally mediated male body practice that has gained unprecedented visibility within the post-2008 conjuncture: the YouTube body transformation tutorials presented by the drag queens who have competed on reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009– ) (RPDR). In these tutorials, the contestants draw on the generic conventions of mainstream, cis-gendered, hetero-feminine make-up tutorials in order to demonstrate the different techniques needed to create their drag queen ‘looks’ – the appearance of their drag characters. This chapter explores how this once-marginal body practice achieved the visibility that it had during the post-2008 moment by producing a version of drag culture designed to exploit digital capitalism’s sex/gender order. This is a culture in which digital media has helped facilitate the movement of once-marginalised expressions of sex and gender into the mainstream but only on the condition they advance neoliberalism’s ideological and material interests. RPDR presents a version of drag that does precisely this, repurposing drag’s subversive potential in the interests of neoliberalism. In so doing, the success of RPDR and its body project provides further evidence that after 2008, neoliberalism has a feminising axiomatic that can be read through the digital mediation of male body practices.

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