Self-(re)presentation in Drag Contexts: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Queens’ Entrance in "RuPaul’s Drag Race"

The clever use of language and theatrical display of body are key features of drag performances. Contemporary drag queens are expected to stage witty verbal exchanges, combined with gestures, mimicry, and other non-verbal elements. This kind of talk and performances are enacted according to some key concepts, such as ‘camp’ and ‘realness’, that Drag Culture has inherited from the traditional Ball Culture (Lawrence 2011; Bailey 2013). This article investigates the interplay between body and language in drag race contests, specifically when drag queens introduce themselves to the audience with catchy words and theatrical moves. The study aims at highlighting the linguistic modalities of drag self-(re)presentation in front of an audience and the world, as means of meaning creation and discourse communication. To this purpose, some visual and linguistic examples from the famous show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–ongoing) have been analysed by applying Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; 2006). The research argues with Heller (2018) on how mainstream culture has appropriated and re-signified Ballrooms’ ideology and sources, always through language and body language. This process of shuffling is observed in terms multimodal prosody (Balirano 2017), a semantic re-signification occurring in active and changing visual language.