‘Can you get more American than Native American?’: drag and settler colonialism in RuPaul’s Drag Race

Abstract

ABSTRACTMany scholars argue for an epistemological shift from romanticizing marginalized politics and praxis to understanding them within a spectrum of resisting and reproducing normative and dominant power structures. Scholarship on drag demonstrates that drag as a performative practice that seeks to challenge gender and sexual normativities is often not beyond the logics of hegemony and normativity. Drawing on these critiques, this paper contends that drag as an art form can reproduce the racial and colonial logics of the settler state. The paper traces the workings of settler colonialism that shape drag creativity through the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. To do so, I theorize how Raja, the winner of season 3, performed, imitated, and appropriated indigeneity. I argue that Raja’s act as the ‘Native,’ after Lumbee drag queen Stacy Layne Matthews’s elimination from the show, demonstrates how queer people of colour can become complicit in settler colonial processes. The paper is a call to rethink drag creativity beyond assumed transgressive aesthetics, and to critically engage with racial and settler colonial formations.