Tonight's the Season 2 premiere of RuPaul's Drag Race (9pm on Logo TV or Logo Online)! Among reality contest shows about fashion, style, and beauty, this is my favorite. Hands down. Drag Race has the most diverse group of contestants - in race, gender, sexuality, and likely, class. Last season, three of my favorite contestants were from outside of the U.S.: Bebe Zahara Benet (Camaroon), Ongina (Philippines), and Nina Flowers (Puerto Rico). Also, one of the guest judges last season was Jenny Shimizu (who I adore even if she looked like she was on an Asian American literature panel at MLA)! The photo of Shimizu below (circa her Calvin Klein days) has little to do with this post but it's there because: I. love. Jenny. Shimizu.
I'm looking forward to this season but I'm also a little nervous. The guest judges that have been announced for this season are Kathy Griffin, Cloris Leachman, and Debbie Reynolds. I can't honestly say any of them excite me much. Another reason to be apprehensive about Season 2 is precisely because it's Season 2. Reality shows are always best the first time around. In proceeding seasons, contestants seem too versed and too ready to manufacture drama in order to stand out as a "personality." Ru seems to be hinting at this when she says:The biggest change in this season is the contestants are actually a bit more - how can I put this? They're more tenacious. In the first season, they were a bit more diplomatic because they were representing drag for the first time in a decade. This time around, though, the kids have seen the first show, they know what the prize is, and they know what's at stake, so they have taken the gloves off.Still, can't wait to watch! If you missed Season 1, you can catch up online.
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In related news, RuPaul hates fashion people. She tells W Magazine why she has nothing to do with New York's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: "I think the fashion people are so nasty and so pretentious."
Also, she's got a new book out called, Workin' It! RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style (Harper Collins 2010). Both the TV show and the book firmly position Ru within the increasingly familiar trope of the lifestyle specialist/style guru. In Drag Race, she plays (wonderfully!) the matriarch/mentor to baby drag queens (Nina Flowers even calls Ru, "mother," during their private lunch together).
With Workin' It! (totally judging said book by its cover here), Ru expands her domain of influence, to "provide helpful and provocative tips on fashion, beauty, style, and confidence for girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between!" The neoliberal makeover logic at work in the book is, by now a pretty trite one. As Brenda Weber explains the logic in her essay, "Makeover as Takeover" - see also her new book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Duke UP 2009):
What is different about RuPaul as style guru is the difference of race, gender, and sexuality. And while this is a significant difference, it isn't a radical one. Instead, the book (maybe more than the TV show) is a function of what Lisa Duggan has called "the new homonormativity" of neoliberal sexual politics:
In related news, RuPaul hates fashion people. She tells W Magazine why she has nothing to do with New York's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: "I think the fashion people are so nasty and so pretentious."
Also, she's got a new book out called, Workin' It! RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style (Harper Collins 2010). Both the TV show and the book firmly position Ru within the increasingly familiar trope of the lifestyle specialist/style guru. In Drag Race, she plays (wonderfully!) the matriarch/mentor to baby drag queens (Nina Flowers even calls Ru, "mother," during their private lunch together).
With Workin' It! (totally judging said book by its cover here), Ru expands her domain of influence, to "provide helpful and provocative tips on fashion, beauty, style, and confidence for girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between!" The neoliberal makeover logic at work in the book is, by now a pretty trite one. As Brenda Weber explains the logic in her essay, "Makeover as Takeover" - see also her new book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Duke UP 2009):A new and improved appearance will not only make the woman more congruent with larger codes of beauty, but will increase her confidence and thus her personal power. In order to gain access to this form of power, however, makeover subjects (often called "victims," "targets," "marks") must submit fully to style authorities . . .RuPaul's embracing of her role as neoliberal style guru is evident in the title and description of the book. In articulating style in the language of democracy (here. the Declaration of Independence), RuPaul's book connects the consumption of resources like fashion, beauty, and style commodities to political acts. Workin' It! suggests that "girls and boys, straight and gay - and everyone in between" who wants to be free (and who doesn't want to be free?) needs her style expertise. This is a central tenet of neoliberalism's lifestyle politics: consumer power is political power.
What is different about RuPaul as style guru is the difference of race, gender, and sexuality. And while this is a significant difference, it isn't a radical one. Instead, the book (maybe more than the TV show) is a function of what Lisa Duggan has called "the new homonormativity" of neoliberal sexual politics:
[I]t is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them . . . [through] a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.I love RuPaul. I think she looks amazing and will never be outclassed by any of the contestants on her show. And basically, I can get behind her general message. But her book nonetheless illustrates the power and pervasiveness of neoliberalism as this era's cultural logic.
