CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Klister, Loki |
|---|---|
| Title | Drag As Crime or Drag As Queer? - The Affective Proximity Between Anti-Drag Bills and Mainstream Drag in the Neoliberal U.S. Nation-State |
| Summary | This thesis studies current public discourses around drag in the U.S., namely the so-called “anti-drag bills” issued by local governments and the drag mainstream of RuPaul’s Drag Race. While anti-drag discourses are criminalizing drag for sexualizing children, mainstream drag discourses are claiming to represent queerness itself. By comparing these two drag discourses that seem to counter each other, the thesis tackles an important similarity between them: Both discourses on drag – “drag as crime” and “drag as queer” – are informed by nationalist ideologies that reproduce narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is, on the one hand, producing the ideology of the white, heterosexual, and gender normative U.S. citizen, and on the other hand, the ideology of the neoliberal, multicultural, and LGBTQI+-friendly U.S. nation state. Using Affect Theory and Queer Theory of Color, the thesis provides new ways of tackling these interdependent varieties of nationalist ideologies that reproduce themselves by endlessly abjecting forms of “queerness” that remain unrecognizable to the nation-state and to neoliberal market structures. The thesis argues that one the one hand, the anti-drag bills’ investment in the affect of disgust are not only criminalizing drag but imply the criminalization of trans people as well as the criminalization of racialized immigrants. By doing so, they not only specifically racialize sexual and gender non-conformity but use the molding of non-normative sexualities and genders as a backdrop against which the ideology of white heteronormative/sexist citizenship is reproduced. On the other hand, RuPaul’s Drag Race’s investment in the affect of pride is, while wary about “interse ctionality, 01d; producing neat categories of sexuality, gender, race, and class whose non-conformity can be “overcome” by hard work and fighting for recognition and acceptance from the U.S. nation state. To highlight the inclusionary and assimilationist logic of such a mainstream drag discourse, this thesis studies the U.S. president’s “Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2024” and argues that it is symptomatic of the government’s appropriation of nationalist ideology informing mainstream drag discourses. Against the backdrop of mainstream drag, the U.S. nation-state is not only appropriating the notions of racial, sexual, and gender pride, but thereby able to “free” itself of the shame in the face of exclusionary civil rights that are – in the moment of uttering pride – turned into “past” failures. In the discursive interdependence of anti-drag and mainstream drag, staged on the national scene, the U.S. governments’ racist border regime, the maintenance of settler-colonialism, global military operations and capitalist destructions are effectively concealed. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/klister_loki.pdf |
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