‘And may the best…thing win!’: Posthuman actor–networks in RuPaul’s Drag Race

Abstract

Over the past fourteen years, the highly successful reality TV competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race has popularized drag as the male performance of an idealized female form. Current scholarship on the show mostly investigates its human components in terms of race, body types or social networks, but the plethora of not necessarily gendered non-human actors that contribute to drag performance remains underappreciated. Drawing on actor–network and assemblage theories in a posthuman framework to acknowledge the shared and convergent agencies of humans and things, this article focuses on three major areas: first, the progressive opening of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s runway to creatures whose gender becomes less relevant because they can no longer be viewed as human or were not human to start with; second, drag performance that relies on crucial assemblages of human and non-human co-stars; third, the monetary incentive that pervades the show and becomes one of its most powerful actors.