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Linguæ &
Rivista di lingue e culture moderne
Davide Passa
“Reading is what? Fundamental!”
Reversed (Im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag
Race
https://doi.org/10.14276/l.v23i1.3544
1 / 2023
ISSN 1724-8698
Urbino University Press
Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo
Davide Passa
Università degli Studi Roma Sapienza
davidepassa@live.it
“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed
(im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
ABSTRACT:
Reading is a drag term that refers to the common practice among drag queens of “confronting
someone with witty and creative language that serves to cut or put someone down” (Jones 2007: 83).
Linguistically, it can be considered a form of impoliteness aimed at attacking the addressee’s positive
self-image (Brown and Levinson 1987; Culpeper 1996 and 2011). Nevertheless, this study is based on
the assumption that drag impoliteness does not divide but unites members of the drag community
by establishing “ambivalent solidarity” (Harvey 1998) and entertaining audiences. A small corpus
containing transcripts of the reading mini-challenges in RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-ongoing) will be
examined quantitatively and qualitatively, either manually or using #LancsBox, a new generation
software for the analysis of digitalised texts developed at Lancaster University. Impoliteness among
drag queens is thus not to be seen negatively, as the (im)politeness system – similarly to other
linguistic features of drag lingo – is reversed in comparison to what happens in the heteronormative
society. The better a drag queen is at inventing impolite expressions, the more successful and
respected she will be. It should be borne in mind that this study investigates a fictional representation
of drag lingo, and that impoliteness, as used in telecinematic discourse, serves other purposes when
compared to reality (Dynel 2017; Lorenzo-Dus 2009). Therefore, any generalisation should be made
carefully.
KEYWORDS: impoliteness theory; drag queens; sociolinguistics; queer studies; fictional language.
Linguæ & - 1 / 2023
https://journals.uniurb.it/index.php/linguae
ISSN 1724-8698
Davide Passa
1. Introduction
RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-ongoing, hereafter RPDR) is a Netflix reality
television series hosted by drag mother RuPaul Charles, in which a group of
drag queens compete for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” The
show has become a popular phenomenon, which shows mainstream audiences
the dynamics of 20th century drag ball culture – though a sanitised version,
considering the nature of the show – where rival drag houses competed for
trophies and prizes. While RPDR is a reality programme, it is actually a fictional
representation of drag culture where everything is scripted and very little is
kept to improvisation and naturalness. The language analysed in this study is a
fictional reproduction of natural drag lingo, and any generalisation should be
made very carefully. Ferguson (1998) defines the study of fictional languages as
ficto-linguistics, i.e. the study of languages that occur in fiction rather than in
society. Fictional language differs from natural language in that it “has been
scripted, written and rewritten, censored, polished, rehearsed, and performed.
Even when lines are improvised on set, they have been spoken by
impersonators, judged, approved, and allowed to remain” (Kozloff 2000, 18).
Nevertheless, the show portrays many rituals of drag culture in the style of
the documentary film Paris Is Burning (1990), such as lip-sync battles and the
linguistic phenomenon of reading, which refer to the practice of “confronting
someone with witty and creative language that serves to cut or put someone
down” (Jones 2007, 83). Dynel has analysed the use of impoliteness in
telecinematic discourse, and has claimed that on television “impoliteness is
shown to serve entertainment, being performed primarily for the viewer’s
pleasure and even humour experience” (2017, 360) and quotes Lorenzo-Dus’s
(2009) definition of impoliteness on television as “incivility-as-spectacle”, a
strategy used to give the show dynamism and engage the audience.
1.1 Aim and methodology
This article intends to investigate the linguistic phenomenon of reading in
RPDR. It examines a small sample (4298 words) including the transcripts of the
original dialogues from Season 2 to Season 13 (2010-2021), containing reading
instances; Season 1 was not included in the sample because reading challenges
were introduced only in Season 2. Reading challenges are the most popular
mini-challenges in the show. In every season there is one episode that revolves
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
around drag reading; in this episode, the contestants have to show their reading
skills and be as irreverent and impolite as possible. The data were obtained by
watching the episodes containing the reading challenges and transcribing all the
passages included in them. They were manually transcribed in different Word
files, each file corresponding to one episode so as to allow comparisons with
#Lancsbox. The tools included in the software that will be used in this study
are KWIC and Words, since this research will be based on the analysis of
positive keywords – i.e., words that occur more often in the specialised sample
than in the reference corpus – and their relative frequency per 10k tokens. The
use of positive keywords sheds light on what the content of fictional drag
reading is, whereas their relative frequency tells a lot about what elements of
drag reading as it is portrayed in RPDR are predominant. Besides, seen the
relatively smallness of the sample, it will also be interpreted and analysed
manually, thus also considering elements that only a human being can notice.
This study lies in the field of Language and Sexuality Studies, and the
framework that will be taken into account is (im)politeness theory (Culpeper
1996 and 2011). While research on impoliteness among queer people has been
abundant (Murray 1979; Heisterkamp and Alberts 2000; Perez 2011, among
others), research on impoliteness within a drag context is relatively scarce, with
McKinnon being one of the few linguists to study impoliteness among drag
queens, claiming that reading is aimed, among other things, to “building a thick
skin for each other to face a hostile environment from LGBT and non-LGBT
people” (2017, 90).
2. Drag lingo
In the light of the performative turn introduced by Butler with her
pioneering research Gender Trouble (1990), the concept of gender has been
theorised outside of the rigid binary system of women and men, in that gender
is a social construct that people perform ceaselessly. Drag queens and their
lingo are a fierce critic towards the fixed heteronormative binary system, as the
features that are commonly attached to men’s and women’s languages are
intermingled in a quite unique way. Barrett (2017) is of the opinion that
oppressed groups, such as drag queens, appropriate and re-signify the language
of the heteronormative culture to create their own secret lingo. The use of the
“prestigious”, heteronormative form does not mean that drag queens want to
align themselves with the groups that use that kind of language; on the
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contrary, they want to mock them. Drag lingo, therefore, has allowed drag
queens to develop their own identity and create subcultural communities where
they feel accepted and understood.
Reading has much to say about drag queens, and is quite representative of
their controversial nature. Drag queens are not only men who wear feminine
clothes and exaggerate feminine behaviour; they are primarily men – but not
necessarily, since RPDR has also hosted male-to-female transsexual people –
performing a parody of heteronormative gender binarism. Oostrik (2014)
claims that the femininity of drag queens is a performance of an exaggerated
representation of gender that ridicules restrictive gender roles and sexual
identification. Indeed, drag queens intend the performance of femininity as an
ironic and political critique of the rigidity of heteronormative gender roles,
which are based on the “assumption that everyone is heterosexual and the
recognition that all social institutions […] are built around a heterosexual
model of male/female social relations” (Nagel 2003, 49-50). Anything that
deviates from perceived heteronormative norms is considered a deviation, and
dragqueenism is a socially engaged art that satirises heteronormative social
conventions. Drag queens are usually mentioned in Gender Studies as they
clearly embody the difference existing between biological sex and cultural
gender, the former being fixed and determined by an individual’s genitalia, the
latter being a “free-floating artifice” (Butler 1990, 10) that is determined by the
repeated actions of an individual. Gender is performative, and language is an
instrument through which people perform their gender identities.
My claim is that reading is one of the ways drag queens have at their
disposal to construct their gender identity through language. The lingo created
by drag queens reflects their gender fluidity and is one of the means that they
have to create their collective identity. Drag queens are members of a speech
community, a group whose members are “in habitual contact with each other
by means of language, either by a common language or by shared ways of
interpreting linguistic behaviour where different languages are in use in an area”
(Swann et al. 2004, 293). Drag lingo creates a sense of drag “sorority” in which
they can identify and support each other. It is an expression of the “umbrella”
linguistic variety known as camp talk (see also Harvey 1998; 2000; 2002;
Bronksi 1984; Core 1984) which is characterised by the co-occurrence of
linguistically contradictory features, as a way to mock heteronormative gender
binarism. Barrett (1995) claims that drag queens convey their queerness “by
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
skilfully switching between a number of linguistic styles and forms that
stereotypically tend to denote other identities” (cit. in Kulick 2000, 25). Indeed,
drag lingo is extremely creative, and this creativity reflects drag queens’ “ability
to play with language, create inside jokes, catchphrases, and neologisms. […]
They create their own vocabulary, one that sets them apart from mainstream
English language users” (Libby 2014, 52). Creativity is also evident in the term
“reading” itself, which is a standard noun that has been appropriated and
creatively reconceptualised to mean something new in drag lingo.
3. Drag
reading
Linguistically, reading is a kind of insult and can therefore be considered a
form of impoliteness. Following Brown and Levinson’s argument (1987),
linguistic impoliteness originates from Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). People
have an identity face that they try to preserve and promote in their social
relationships. Impoliteness originates when at least one FTA is used to attack
people’s face. In Culpeper’s framework, negative impoliteness is defined as “the
use of strategies designed to […] scorn or ridicule, be contemptuous, do not
treat the other seriously, belittle the other, invade the other’s space, explicitly
associate the other with a negative aspect” (2011, 41). Insults, as in the case of
drag reading, are instances of negative impoliteness in that they threaten
people’s desire to be valued and recognized. An FTA occurs when this desire is
not respected, and the speaker does not care about the positive self-image of
the addressee. Culpeper adds that impoliteness only occurs when the speaker
intentionally communicates the face attack, and the hearer perceives the FTA as
intentionally face-attacking. The term identity face, furthermore, encompasses
both the quality and the social face that people have, the former referring to
people’s personal characteristics (e.g. drag queens’ physical appearance or
personality), the latter referring to how individuals deal with the characteristics
of social groups (e.g. drag queens’ professionalism).
Minority groups, however, may also use impoliteness for other purposes,
such as “ambivalent solidarity” (Harvey 1998, 301-03), which is fundamental to
the construction of a shared identity, as both the sender and the receiver of the
FTA are mutually affected by it. Culpeper asserts that, generally, mock
impoliteness ‘‘takes place between equals, typically friends, and is reciprocal’’
(2011, 215). This is particularly true of non-heteronormative people, who may
use homophobic insults towards other non-heteronormative people as a form
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of cultural reappropriation of heteronormative derogatory terms and of mock
impoliteness, equally highlighting both speaker’s vulnerability to the same
threat. This is the case of drag queens, who, as members of the LGBTQI+
community, may use negative impoliteness for completely different purposes
when compared to other members of the heteronormative society. The
intention behind drag impoliteness is reversed, since they do not wish to
discredit the addressee tout court, but in so doing they construct a sense of
belonging to the same drag community. Moreover, the use of impoliteness
among drag queens is not to be seen negatively, as the (im)politeness system is
reversed, and the better a drag queen is at inventing impolite expressions, the
more successful and respected she will be. The inversion of the (im)politeness
system is in line with the controversial nature of drag queens, which is
epitomised by the gender identities that they perform, and the linguistic
features that they use. If we consider – erroneously – drag queens as authentic
representation of femininity, then the use of reading is at odds with the
linguistic features of women’s language, as were discussed by Lakoff (1975);
however, drag queens do not intend the performance of femininity
authentically, and the use of direct and insulting expressions epitomises their
desire to subvert rules of gender.
Reading, however, is not to be considered a kind of genuine impoliteness,
since it should not be taken seriously by the addressee. Unlike genuine
impoliteness, mock impoliteness1 is positively evaluated by the participants in
the conversation. Mock impoliteness involves the positive evaluation of an
insult directed at a target as supportive of interpersonal relationships; it is
impoliteness that remains on the surface, since it is understood that it is not
intended to cause offence. The contestants in the RPDR expect to be read by
their rivals, and especially when reading is delivered in the context of a mini-
challenge, they do not consider it offensive as they are required to be as shadier2
as possible to win the challenge. Haugh and Bousfield claim that “such threats
to person and relationship(s) with others can also be treated as ‘allowable’ if
participants orient to the offence as being relationship supportive […] and also
as being in line with the interactional practice in which the participants are
currently engaged” (2012, 1103). In addition to building in-group solidarity,
1 For a detailed analysis of mock impoliteness, see Leech 1983; Culpeper 1996, 2011; Bernal
2008; Haugh and Bousfield 2012.
2 The drag adjective shady means disrespectful.
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
mock impoliteness is also used as a practice in which the addressee is insulted
for the entertainment of the others (Culpeper 2011). In S5E7, Michelle Visage
explains that “when reading, some people can take it personally […] if it's not
funny. But if it’s funny, you’re almost forgiven. It’s, like, given a pass.” Drag
queens are performers and for their performances to be successful they have to
be entertaining, irreverent and funny; their greatest fear in the reading mini-
challenge and in other challenges (e.g. Snatch Game maxi challenge, where the
contestants have to impersonate famous people) is to not be able to make
RuPaul, the judges and the other contestants laugh. When reading is not
delivered successfully, an awkward and uncomfortable silence descends on the
studio, often highlighted by the sound of crickets in the background.
4. Language and Sexuality Studies & Corpus Linguistics
The language to be examined in this study is contained in a small,
specialised3 sample of 4298 tokens. The data comprised in a specialised sample
is compared with OANC reference corpus, which is a larger corpus that is
chosen because it has some similarities with the sample under scrutiny.
Research on corpus linguistics4 and sexuality is relatively sparse.
Motschenbacher (2018) and Baker and Brookes (2021) provide brief overviews
of the ways corpus linguists has studied sexuality. Motschenbacher (2018)
claims that the use of this methodology in language and sexuality studies is still
limited, and he also denounces the fact that previous corpus linguistic studies
on language and sexuality have focused on the discursive construction of sexual
identities rather than on the language in use to index the speaker’s sexuality; in
other words, they lament the fact that corpus linguistics has more often than
not been interested in describing how language is used to speak about non-
heterosexual people (Bolton 1995; Baker 2005; Bachmann 2011; Morrish and
Sauntson 2011; Baker and Love 2015; Baker and Brookes 2021) rather than
describing the way language is actually – and allegedly – used by non-
heterosexual people to communicate (King 2009 and 2015; Caskey 2011;
Bogetić 2013).
3 This is a specialised (or purpose-built) sample because it is only representative of the linguistic
variety spoken by a particular social group, at a particular time and place (Hunston 2002).
4 For detailed accounts of the field, see Hunston (2002), McEnery et al. (2006), McEnery and
Ardie (2012) and Biber and Randy (2015).
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5. Analysis
As Figure 1 shows, a careful examination of the dialogues has revealed
that drag reading in RPDR can be organised into six major categories
depending on the content of the insults; physical appearance,
professionalism and personality seem to predominate. These macro-
categories have been established by analysing the texts manually and
noticing common trends in them.
Figura 1.
Reading in RPDR
The following sections will discuss more extensively each of the categories
visualised in Figure 1, and will provide some examples to get a clearer idea of
how drag reading works.
5.1 Physicality
Physicality is the reading category that appears more frequently in the show
(48%), representing almost half of the reading instances in RPDR. This is
based on taking a physical element of a drag queen and exaggerating it in order
to make it entertaining. Physical reading is mainly based on aspects of the body
that are considered negative for a drag queen, such as excessive weight and
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
masculinity. The more feminine a drag queen looks, the fishier5 she will be
considered. This kind of insult also includes drag queens’ white teeth, which is
apparently of great importance among the contestants, as many readings
throughout the seasons focus on the contestants’ smiles. Teeth are important
because drag queens are above all lip-sync performers, and during their
performances they tend to show their teeth a lot as a way to be more expressive
and dramatic. Some of the physical reading referring to drag queens’ teeth are
listed below:
(a) Smile for me. Don’t smile. (S2E7)
(b) Miss Tyra, was your barbecue cancelled? Your grill is fucked up. (S2E7)
(c) Jiggly, here’s my dentist’s card. Use it. (S4E7)
(d) Rob-bie Turn-ter! I know you’re a big fan of classic movies and television.
May I recommend one of my favourite classic TV shows? “Flipper.” (S8E6)
(e) Asia O’Hara, you get your tights from Amazon, you get some of your
outfits from Amazon, and apparently they sell teeth, too. (S10E7)
The previous examples focus either on the low quality of dental veneers (d,
e) or on the crooked teeth that the contestants have (a, b, c). It is interesting to
notice the reference to the cartoon Flipper, as well as the reference to Amazon,
which is in line with the recurring references to pop culture, typical of drag
lingo. This may be in line with citationality, which is one of the features of
camp talk – and drag lingo may be included in this umbrella term – according
to Harvey (1998; 2000; 2002).
Botulin is another common trend in physical reading, since many drag
queens seek help from cosmetic surgery to get a feminine backside, increase the
volume of their lips, cheekbones or just to refresh their look, often with
dubious results, as is shown in the following examples:
(f) Honey, just go jumping in the ocean. You won’t drown. Silicone floats.
(S3E8)
(g) Willam, honey, your face is made out of marble. Shit don’t move. (S4E7)
(h) Jiggly Caliente, B.M.W., Body Made Wrong. (S4E7)
(i) Detox, is Amanda Lepore your mother? ‘Cause there’s a lot of silicone going
on there. (S5E7)
(j) Detox, you’re so seductive, but unfortunately, it’s illegal to do it with you
because most of your parts are under 18 years of age. (S5E7).
5 Fish is a drag term for “feminine.”
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These few examples show how entertaining drag reading can be, turning
extremely impolite statements into something funny. If they are not
entertaining, though, reading can turn from mock into genuine impoliteness.
This is perhaps the most immediate and least refined kind of
reading, since it is merely based on the physical appearance of a drag queen.
Figure 2 includes the data obtained from comparing the specialised sample
and the reference corpus with the Words tool included in #LancsBox. Figure
2 is a visualisation of three of the most recurrent positive keywords in the
sample. The high relative frequency (per 10k tokens) of the keywords “fat,”
“body” and “smile” may be a signal of the fact that most of the impolite
language used in the reading mini-challenge in RPDR is body-based.
Figura 2.
Keywords and relative frequency in RPDR.
With the only aim of providing a few instances of this kind of reading, it is
worth remembering drag queen Jujubee (S2E7) who, referring to Tyra Sanchez’s
teeth exclaims “Miss Tyara, was your barbecue cancelled? Your grill is fucked
up;” Alaska Thunderfuck (S5E7), when referring to Detox Icunt, who is
remembered for her abuse of Botulin, exclaims “Detox, you’re so seductive,
but unfortunately it’s illegal to do it with you because most of your parts are
under 18 years of age,” hinting at the fact that many parts of her body have
been subject to cosmetic surgery.
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
Figure 3, furthermore, is based on the data obtained by crossing the
occurrences of physical reading and their distribution in the sample; it shows
that since 2009, when the show was launched in the USA, there has been a
tendency towards gradually reducing – with its ups and downs – the instances
of reading based on physical appearance, which may be due to the fact that
body shaming is becoming a sensitive topic of discussion in the last years. Even
though body shaming in the show is delivered as a form of mock impoliteness,
it may still promote a negative response to the body in the global society, thus
its gradual disappearance from the show. Furthermore, “if reading is masterful
insult, then reading a queen for her size […] is seen as boring, insulting and
deeply inadequate” (O’Halloran 2017, 220), as insulting somebody on the basis
of their physical appearance is too immediate and simple.
Figura 3.
Physical reading
5.2 Professionalism
29% of the reading instances in RPDR are based on the professional skills
of the contestants. Professionalism includes mainly the stage clothes a
contestant has or is able to sew, the ability to walk down the catwalk and to
make-up (or to beat, as drag queens say); references are also made to previous
mini and maxi challenges where the contestants proved to be particularly
unsuccessful, thus becoming the object of scorn. Figure 4 shows that three
positive keywords in the sample refer to professionalism; they are “talented,”
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“fashion” and “make-up,” which are considerably more recurring in the
specialised sample than in OANC Spoken.
Figura 4.
Keywords and relative frequency
Some of the instances including reading based on professionalism are the
following:
(a) For someone who calls themselves a top, you sure do like being on
the bottom. (S5E7)
(b) Jinkx Monsoon, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, you’re great at the
challenges, but on the runway, you’re a bust (S5E7)
Reading (a) is based on the double meaning of the words “top” and
“bottom,” which among queer people are used to refer to, respectively,
someone who likes giving anal intercourse to other men, and its opposite. What
the contestant is referring to is that for as much as her colleague likes to define
her sexual role as active, she seems actually to enjoy being on the bottom of the
charts as one of the worst contestants in the season. Reading (b) is a semi-
quotation of the Book of Common Prayer to create the rhyme dust-bust.
5.3 Personality
This category comprises all the instances of reading addressed towards the
contestants’ real and drag personalities. They mainly allude to silliness, excessive
loquacity, narcissism and promiscuity. These are all characteristics that can be
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
commonly found in RPDR, since the drag queens in the show are required to
be as loud and extravagant as possible in the interest of their visibility, but also
of the programme and entertainment. Joslyn Fox in S6E6 addresses Adore
Delano by saying “you know you’re from the West Coast because it’s a four-
hour delay before you finally get a joke;” Adore Delano is often mocked for her
slow-wittedness, which is often associated to the stereotype of the Valley girl
from L.A. In the same season, Darienne Lake refers to Ben De La Crème by
saying “you remind me of a Russian doll – full of yourself,” which refers to her
egocentrism; in S11E9, Brooke Lynn Hytes addresses Plastique Tiara by
declaring “I’m looking for a new apartment. How much are you charging for
the vacant space between your ears?,” which is another creative instance of
reading based on someone’s silliness. These are just a few examples of the
many instances of reading based on drag queens’ personalities.
5.4 Other
Quite a significant number of reading instances are based on the age (5%)
of the contestants. They are used to insult drag queens who are considered
either too old or too young to be in the show. This is the case of Robbie Tuner
(S8E6) who claims “Naomi, I’m gonna give you some advice, darling. No one’s
gonna take you seriously if you were born after Windows 95 came out,” to
which Naomi replies “Robbie Tuner, we know you’re a vintage queen, but do
you have to smell like mothballs, too?” An extremely little number of insults is
based on ethnicity and language (1% each). Racial commentaries are addressed
mainly towards Black, Latino and Asian contestants, as is the case of Tyra
Sanchez (S2E7) who addresses the Laotian American drag queen Jujubee by
saying “we have an under-grown orangutan,” which would make the audience’s
flesh creep if it were pronounced today, twelve years after. One reading is
addressed towards two white drag queens, who are insulted for not being able
to twerk like Black people; this is the case of Denali (S13E7) who addresses
Olivia Lux in order to read two other drag queens, “Olivia, your teeth are
whiter than Utica and Gottmik trying to twerk to disco,” which hints at the
Caucasian ethnicity of the two contestants and their inability to twerk as Black
drag queens do. This insult is delivered by a white drag queen towards two
other white drag queens, thus establishing “ambivalent solidarity.”
Discrimination on the basis of linguistic skills is another very common
trend in RPDR, as drag queens are expected to be extremely quick and smart in
the language they use. Foreign drag queens or anglophone drag queens speaking
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non-standard varieties of American English are often put down by the other
contestants and penalised in many challenges in the show. The instances of
reading based on language are certainly many more in the show, but if we
consider the reading mini-challenge only, they represent only 1% of the reading
instances. They are mainly addressed towards Yara Sofia (S3), who is from
Puerto Rico, Nicky Doll (S12), who is a French drag queen, and Adore Delano
(S6) and Gottmik (S13E7), who are from Los Angeles. It is interesting to notice
that the Valleyspeak – i.e. the sociolect used mainly in California – is generally
associated to dumbness, as it has often been used to portray silly girls in
sitcoms, also known as Valley Girls. Denali (S13E7) addresses Gottmik by
saying “Gottmik, you are so L.A., even your farts have a vocal fry,” mentioning
the typical nasal sound and breathiness of Valleyspeak.
6. Conclusions
The title of this article is a motto repeated by RuPaul and her daughters
when “opening the library” for the reading mini-challenge to begin. Reading is
fundamental in the drag community in its etymological sense: it is one of the
foundations of the community itself, in that it has always been a common
practice among drag queens, a way to create a sense of belonging in a
subcultural world that is becoming gradually more mainstream thanks to
audiovisual products like RPDR and Pose (2018-ongoing). For the first time and
with a considerable success all over the world, these series bring the dynamics
of the drag ball room culture to the attention of the mainstream audiences.
Reading is an interesting phenomenon for sociolinguists, as it can be
categorised as impoliteness, but it actually is not. Reading uses the same
strategies of impoliteness, but its effect is not that of creating distance between
the parties, nor that of attacking the addressee’s face. Similarly to other
characteristics of drag queens, such as their gender identities and linguistic
features, impoliteness is reversed. The gender that drag queens perform is the
opposite of the gender that heteronormativity would attach to them. Following
Butler’s argument, fluidity implies that gender is not a consequence of sex and
vice-versa. For instance, if a person was born with male genitalia, it does not
necessarily follow that this person will behave, wear clothes, style his/her hair,
and talk like a man. The linear association of sex and gender is promoted by
heteronormativity, which is based on the “assumption that everyone is
heterosexual and the recognition that all social institutions […] are built around
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“Reading Is What? Fundamental!”: Reversed (im)politeness in RuPaul’s Drag Race
a heterosexual model of male/female social relations” (Nagel 2003, 49–50).
Heteronormativity implies that all people can be classified into the binary
system male-female, and that heterosexuality is the only acceptable sexuality. To
use Peppermint’s (RPDR, S9) statement, “the entire point of drag is to give the
middle finger to rules of gender.” This is reflected in some drag linguistic
features, such as gender inversion – i.e. the use of female gender markers like
pronouns, adjectives and vocatives to refer to men – but also the intermingling
of linguistic features that are commonly associated to women with others
associated more to men.
Reading follows this same line, in that it takes impoliteness as it occurs in
the heteronormative society and turns it into its opposite, i.e. something
positively evaluated, something that one has to aspire to rather than avoid. Of
all the reading instances in the reading mini-challenges in RPDR (S2-S13), three
categories occur more significantly than the others, i.e. reading based on drag
queens’ physical aspect, professionalism and personality. Following the previous
distinction between quality and social face, it is interesting to notice that
although physical aspect and personality may be categorised as quality face in
that they refer to personal aspects, they seem to be actually addressed towards
drag queens’ social face. If we consider dragqueenism as performance, then
every aspect of drag queens should be referred to their social face, that is their
face as members of a community of drag performers. Mock insults delivered
against drag queens’ ugliness, weight, or other physical aspects that are
commonly seen negatively, but also negative sides of their personalities, have an
inevitable negative impact also on their professional lives. This study has sought
to find common trends in the sample and categorise the reading instances on
the basis of positive keywords and relative frequency, as well as the dispersion
on the sample.
Interestingly, every aspect of a drag rival is potentially something that can
be criticised in the reading mini-challenge. It could be the drag queens’ teeth,
which are either too yellow or too white, or their lips, which are either too thin
or too full, or their bodies, which are either too slim or (to use a politically
incorrect adjective) too fat. They are either too young or too old, too discreet or
too loud, too white to twerk like a real black woman. This is because the most
skilled drag queens always know how to read their competitors, and they have
the ability to focus on a single feature of a drag queen and exasperate it so that
it becomes the basis of their mocking insults. If it is true that the sample is
characterised by a significant presence of readings based on physicality (see also
157
Davide Passa
the positive keywords in the sample compared to the OANC Spoken reference
corpus in Figure 2), then it is also true that their distribution in the sample
gradually decreases over the years, as can be seen in Figure 3, in line with the
increased attention paid to body shaming on TV. A further common
characteristic of the reading instances in the sample is the denigration of
unnaturalness, which is a paradox if one considers dragqueenism as an
unnatural exaggeration of femininity. Unnaturalness underlies every aspect of
drag art, be it physicality (e.g. exaggerated cosmetic surgery), personality (e.g.
flamboyant behaviour for visibility) or professionalism (e.g. excessive make-up).
After all, the use of reading in RPDR is subject to telecinematic requirements,
for it is a means of attracting the audience’s attention and entertaining them.
Mock impoliteness in the form of drag reading becomes a spectacle, a
necessary ingredient to captivate the audience.
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