"We're all born naked and the rest is drag": corporalidades transviadas e textualidades drag a partir de RuPaul's Drag Race

Abstract

This study is dedicated to the articulation of drag textualities from the researcher's experience with this universe, taking as a starting point the American reality show RuPaul's Drag Race. For this, we assume that drag bodies are assembled by ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions constituted from their own dynamics; that not only show themselves with relative transitoriness from the multiple normativities, but propose new identity arrangements expressed in the materialities of their bodies that are related not only to gender tensions. For us, the drag body results from a handling of language, experiences and occupation of existential and physical territories — not limited to being only a support of signs, but an instrument that, by presenting these same signs, points towards transformation. In the organization of the research, we mapped out performatic practices, distributed through space and time, that underlie what we understand as contemporary drag scene, while we related conceptualizations and theoretical references related to gender studies, sexuality and platformization to direct our gaze on the phenomenon, which expands through the flows of information — and textualities — spreaded through digital platforms. This point was fundamental to the affect writing of the work, in which the relationship of the researcher with the program, from the potentialities of the platforms, presented itself as a guiding thread to follow the drag textualities in the scene we observed.