RuPaul’s Drag Race: You Have A RACE Problem
The Problem of Racialized Queens for Consumption on a White Mainstream Drag Stage. by SapoV and R20
RuPaul’s Drag Race: You Have A RACE Problem
“We are not suggesting that people from racialized or language-minoritized communities should not seek to engage in linguistic practices deemed appropriate by mainstream society. However, we contend that the question of whether members of racialized communities are accepted as appropriately engaging in these linguistic practices continues to be determined by the White listening subject, not by the speakers’ actual practices” (Rosa & Flores, 2017, p.186).
This weekend, our social media feeds are saturated with expressions of consternation, shock, and mourning for the recent departure of our dear Valentina from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Despite the despair, the pragmatists and rule-followers in our networks justify her dismissal because of her shoddy performance in this week’s “maxi” challenge and even shoddier lip-synch-for-her-life. She didn’t follow the rules. She didn’t do her best. She shut down. She gave up. She just didn’t pull them straps on those stilettos up high enough. But many of us are left uneasy by these latter arguments, and at the same time are proud of the ways that Valentina challenged normative meritocracy on such a public stage.
For many of us Latinx fans, we can listen to the justification of her departure with the usual feigned patience of similar arguments that we hear about our communities. The same assimilationist arguments that “celebrate” our uniqueness, but ultimately ask us to conform to a mainstream norm to succeed. In many respects, Valentina embodied the ideal assimilated, “culturally diverse,” candidate on the mainstream stage of RPDR: She is markedly Latinx (down to her praying to la Virgen de Guadalupe), speaks Spanish, but also speaks great un-accented English…and she is gorgeous! Even RuPaul said that she thought that Valentina would make it to the finals. But her downfall was ultimately due to her inability...or perhaps refusal...to conform completely to the White listening and watching subjects of the “mainstream” audience of shows like RPDR. That is why we say that this show has a RACE problem.
Yes, we know. The host of a the show is an out black queen, and many of the winning queens have been black and/or racially ambiguous. (And we'll leave it to other scholars to talk about the anti-black undercurrents of the show.) But we all know that representation doesn’t always solve the underlying problematics of WHO among us “minorities” get to make it (win) in normative White space. In today’s world, racism can be more insidious and rampant even in spaces replete with black and brown faces. Our lens here focuses on the role that the politics of language played in the perpetual “othering” and ultimate downfall of two powerful (fan favorite) Latinx queens on the show.
To build our argument, let us rewind to the other Latinx queen to be asked to “sashay away” this season, Cynthia Lee Fontaine. Cynthia was arguably less of an ideal assimilated subject: she spoke English with a “heavy accent” and often encountered “cultural clashes” with other contestants. Unsurprisingly, she was widely panned for her inability to convincingly lip sync her part as Kim Kardashian in the “Kardashian the Musical” parody. She also didn’t fare well in her lip-sync-for-her-life. In both cases, the accompanying songs were in English; informal, colloquial, musical English that rarely followed the grammar and syntax of spoken language. The norms of this (anglo) mainstream drag stage put her at a disadvantage from the beginning. This never was HER stage, and to an extant wasn’t Valentina’s either.
Many language-minoritized and racialized communities have been in these queens’ proverbial pumps and performed on similar proverbial stages that were not designed for us--where we are closely scrutinized for how "well" we perform in normative White space. The RPDR stage is arguably a normative White space, one where the politics of language are a little more subtle. Indeed, Black English dominates the stage, but we argue that it is the Black English that has been sanctioned by the White gay community and has been normalized as the usual dialect of the “bitchy queen.” The RPDR stage is not designed for Latinx queens who thrive and shine on their usual stages that embrace their linguistic diversity and dexterity. But Cynthia and Valentina did their best, often leveraging the other equally important components of a good lip-sync: serving good body and moves.
But that was not enough, apparently. Not for these queens. Focus was kept on their mouths. The mouths that did not, according to the judges, adequately mimic the contours of a normed “language” practice of that stage. They (Valentina and Cynthia) embodied too much of the linguistically racialized subject that is yet to be appropriated by the White mainstream drag stage. That is, with the exception of phrases like “echa palante” and “cucu”, which are mostly deployed to harken to Queens long gone from the competition.
We don’t know if attaining such a mainstream status is a goal to aspire to. And really, Spanish has its own problematic colonial baggage that should always be unpacked.
The real moments of admiration are those of resistance by Valentina and Cynthia. The act of refusal by Valentina to NOT remove her mask in her final lip sync can be seen as her challenging the norms of that White stage, where she sought to rewrite the rules for an instant. Similarly, Cynthia’s over-the-top gestures and dance moves sought to claim rights to space and transform a stage that was not welcoming to her full authentic self from the onset. These attempts were thwarted, of course.
Alas, sometimes those White normative stages can be intractable, or more resistant to change than we would like them to be. And so we seek other stages where we can serve our “daytime realness” in more fully authentic ways. We leave you with Valentina performing on one such stage, while serving a full-bodied Latinx Queenness that the mainstream may never have or understand, but that will help us heal our collective heartbreak.
youtube.com
Become a Community Contributor.
