Stefani Konstantinesku

  Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences | Bachelor Arts and Culture

"We Are All Born Naked and the Rest is Drag” Resistance Conceptualized Through Drag Performance: From the 1960s to the Present Day"

Stefani's elevator pitch
The artform of drag is often considered to serve a political function: to challenge and deconstruct existing assumptions about gender and sexuality. Applying Judith Butler’s queer theoretical approach, this thesis explores drag queen resistance in the 1968 documentary The Queen and season 13 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Stemming from the fact that today’s drag is commercially viable, brand-oriented, and mainstream, this thesis explores whether embracing said mainstream entails the dissipation of meaningful challenges to capitalism. By comparing how resistance was enacted by drag queens in the 1960s, and the present day, it becomes clear that although the commercialization of drag culture has dampened the artforms’ subversive potential, we have yet to reach a stage in which drag performances are a normative act.