Abstract
The article aims to critically explore and understand the ways both RuPaul’s star persona and its program, RuPaul’s Drag Race, are distributed in Italy, circulate across, and impact on the Italian television industry and media culture, it also aims to show how many forms of national mediation, professional negotiation and audience reception deeply modify, and re-shape the TV product. To tackle the manifold facets of this case, four aspects will be analyzed: (trans)national distribution; adaptation and dubbing; global/local stardom; reception and cultural impact. Over a decade, the Italian edition and distribution of the show have changed, together with the national media landscape and its audiences.
Highlights
RuPaul’s Drag Race is a TV show, a reality competition with drag queen contestants performing and being evaluated by expert judges, which has reached the eleventh season and given birth to several extensions and spinoffs
Despite the complexity of the language and of the cultural issues covered by RPDR, the overall translation and adaptation strategy suffers from a lack of quality standards that are granted to fictional and more in general to mainstream programs
For drag queen communities RPDR represents a real model of life, keeping in mind that doing drag is a very complex and variable process depending on the different choices, but that involves a very profound identity mode that goes beyond mere dressing up.[54]
Summary
RuPaul’s Drag Race is a TV show, a reality competition with drag queen contestants performing and being evaluated by expert judges, which has reached the eleventh season and given birth to several extensions and spinoffs. With eight performers singing, dancing and acting, evaluated by a group of celebrities, the program was cancelled after only two episodes, due to low ratings and several protests by conservative associations and family pressure groups This fact is an indication of the lasting Italian fame of RuPaul’s TV personality; and it is curious to note how the Italian show was based on very similar mechanisms to the ones employed by Drag Race, which only started many years later, in 2009 ( many accounts date back RuPaul and his producers’ idea to the mid-Nineties).[6] In this context, the first attempt to import and broadcast RPDR on Italian television was made in 2011, two years after the launch of the US first season on Logo. Trailer of RuPaul’s Drag Race: Werq The World Tour 2019
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