“Get in some good trouble!” Meaning and Representation in Drag Response to Hate Crimes. A Stylistic and Multimodal Analysis

In recent years, incidents of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender and religion have risen sharply. The murder of George Floyd has sparked the emergence of movements that intersect various rights initiatives. This activism is more intersectional, highlighting the awareness among activists of the need to address multiple levels of discrimination simultaneously. This has emerged through public protests and celebrity support for equality and solidarity, despite being countered by right-wing policies. This article examines solidarity and resistance movements from a linguistic and multimodal perspective, focusing on televised drag queen activism, specifically on one episode of RuPaul’s Drag Raceseason 13, recorded in 2020. The study examines how drag queens perceive and respond to hate crimes, testing a cross-disciplinary approach using Stylistics and Multimodality. Drag performances are analysed in terms of transitivity and representation of social actors, to investigate and better understand the semioticprocess of meaning-making, and to gain insights into the drag community’s response to Hate Speech.