Across seventeen seasons—and counting—an All Stars spin-off, and a seemingly endless series of international franchises, RuPaul’s Drag Race has had plenty of iconic, memetic moments in its storied, ongoing history. Whether it’s Latrice Royale complaining about “Romper Room fuckery” in Snatch Game, Aja’s declaration that iconic reality TV villain Valentina “looks like Linda Evangelista,” or, to pick something more contemporary, the season 13 Untucked bust-up between Tamisha Iman and Kandy Muse, in which the latter declares her possession of “star quality.” The other thing that these moments all have in common is that, in ‘Bitch, I’m a Drag Queen,’ an early episode of the show’s seventeenth season, the contestants were tasked with singing parody songs that referenced these moments from the show’s own history.
This isn’t the first time Drag Race has looked at its own back door for challenge inspiration; in season 5, the queens performed lip sync renditions of previous moments from Untucked. So in theory, this isn’t a big deal; Drag Race is just continuing to do what it always has. But over a decade since those untucked lip syncs, Drag Race’s place in queer culture—and the things that it’s actually able to reference—has changed in a way that seems to have turned RuPaul’s reality TV show empire into a snake that’s primed to eat its own tail.
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In its earlier years, Drag Race would often find itself referencing iconic moments of queer culture; whether in the obligatory reading challenge—which Ru acknowledges, even to this day, is done “in the tradition of the legendary Paris is Burning”—to the character choices on Snatch Game; Little Edie from Grey Gardens, Mae West, Paul Lynde. There was a sense of Drag Race being in dialogue with the culture that played a role in creating it, and, maybe more importantly than that, offering a way into that cultural history for people who hadn’t been exposed to it in the past. There was a sense that one of the best things Drag Race could do was platform this culture through that uniquely queer, camp sensibility of parody.
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Now, Drag Race has become the centre of the queer culture that it used to reference, and it seems that in response to this, the show has been left with nothing left to talk about but itself.
Some of this can be seen in the Snatch Game characters that queens choose; more and more from the show’s “modern era” – mostly broadly defined as being from season 7 onwards, with a move to a different network, a competition narrative specifically about the clash between two different styles of drag: old school pageantry in one corner, and something contemporary, fashion-forward, less performance focused, in the other. The winner of that first modern season, Violet Chachki, impersonated former contestant Alyssa Edwards (whose “…backrolls?!” declaration was also one of the parodies in ‘Bitch I’m a Drag Queen’), and All Stars 3 winner Trixie Mattel offered up an ill-advised impression of Ru herself.
But it isn’t just the way queens approach the challenges that shows the place in the pantheon of queer culture that Drag Race has made for itself. Even the judging seems almost painfully aware of the show’s own history. There are some looks, or aesthetic references, that have either been done so well or so often that someone on the panel (read: Michelle Visage) will have something to say about it. The biggest offender is what’s been dubbed “Marie Antoinette,” which we might more accurately call “rococo,” defined by Michelle and the rest of the panel as the white makeup and powdered wig associated with the French court. And sure, this outfit was first worn by Raja in season 3 of the show, all the way back in 2011, and nobody’s worn it as well since, and maybe they should retire the look the same way a sports team retires a player’s number if their act is so good that nobody else can follow it, the same reason that Michael Jordan’s 23 was retired by the Bulls.
But the real problem here is that the show seems to see any reference to historical fashion or aesthetics as something that begins and ends with the Drag Race runway. In the second episode of the latest season, both Hormona Lisa and Joella wore outfits that seemed to directly reference the decapitated former monarch (neither was particularly good or interesting, but I digress), which caused Michelle to suggest banning it as a reference in the future. And then, a couple of months later, for a ‘Who Wears Short Shorts?’ themed runway, Jewels Sparkles caught a stray from Michelle, who insisted that this too was a Marie Antoinette styled outfit, when it barely even feels rococo themed. Drag Race feels increasingly in danger of limiting queens to reference only the show itself, and the cultural language that it has created.
This season, no queen has made this more explicit than Kori King, who has worn outfits that directly reference RuPaul looks, and even walked down the runway in an outfit previously worn by Monet X Change. There’s nothing wrong with influence or reference; its been a cornerstone of queer art, and drag, for decades at this point (even going back to Paris is Burning, the archetypal runway category of Realness is a kind of reference, parody) but its in moments like this that the show reveals the problem of seeming to reference only itself. Season 17 even had a quilted runway that made no references to the AIDS quilt.
This doesn’t mean that it’s a requirement that every season of Drag Race have some reference or other to the AIDS crisis, but instead it seems to indicate a shift in what queens want to reference, in the things that inform their understanding of queer identity, culture, and history. Even in season 17’s ‘The Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent’ monologues, Ru starts by using the framing of The Vagina Monologues in order to let queens tell autobiographical stories, while a scene partner offers an interpretative dance companion piece to the spoken monologue.
And then the runway comes, and Drag Race returns to its most bountiful wellspring: itself. We get another ‘Ugliest Dress Ever’ runway – celebrating a decade since the first one, in season 17 – full of not only dresses that seem unable to understand the word ugly (it might be the best thing Sam Star has worn down the runway all year) but Lana Ja’Rae wears, verbatim, a Kandy Muse dress of mismatched patterns and small handbags.
Some of this is the nature of a show like Drag Race running for as long as it has. Now, potential queens—whether they decide to audition for the show or not—will see Drag Race as their first point of reference for how drag works (particularly drag that has the possibility to move into the mainstream) and rather than becoming a repository for references, Drag Race itself is the referencing, devouring everything in sight until the remains of the show itself are all that the RuPaul empire left to feed upon.♦
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