RuPaul's Drag Race: Culture, Politics and Fashion as Affective Practice

Fashion, like media, offers the unique possibility to address aesthetics, ethics and social power relations all in one. As with media, fashion involves bodies, rituals, material reality as much as fantasy, imagination and creativity. Both, for nearly two decades now, have been defined as part of the creative industries, those key economic activities that derive their economic value first and foremost from their symbolic rather than their material value. This suggests a lack of robustness: that these are luxury goods and therefore suspect. Querying how media and fashion are understood will show how the current regard for the creative industries is predicated on modernity’s deeply split roots despite strong work done on fashion and popular culture over the last two decades. This chapter argues that in the everyday perception and discussion of fashion in and through popular culture, there remains, on the one hand, the critical and rational lineage of Enlightenment thought, and, on the other, romantic sensitivity and openness to magic and creativity. Understanding, appreciating and criticising texts and practices to do with fashion in media and popular culture might benefit from understanding them as affective practice. The competition reality tv show RuPaul’s Drag Race will serve as a case study to find out how affective practice might be brought into discourse. That is to say how we might bring together reflection with emotion and how clothes, and the way they are made and worn, may move us. In RuPaul’s Drag Race clothing is an integral part of a serious and critical queer identity politics that its enormous fan base enjoys passionately, mixing pleasure and emotion with a strong sense that here one may belong without being forced into patriarchal heteronormative categories.