What she says: I’m fine.
What she means: Yes, Shangela was robbed. Yes, Trixie was middling at best, and then only after stronger competitors like Aja were (surreptitiously, it must be added) taken out of the competition. And yes it’s rigga morris so now the All Stars Hall of Fame currently looks whiter than the speaker’s line-up at CPAC. But it’d be a mistake to compare Trixie to Alaska in AS2, who actually slayed challenges and won every lip sync, bribery and corruption to eke out a win notwithstanding. And while it would be tempting to compare Trixie and her win with Sasha Velour and her win, such comparisons rest on two premises. The first, that they’re both undeserving winners of a RuPaul franchise, doesn’t really say anything we didn’t already know. Middling winners are picked for maximum reach and brand development for the same reason the most mediocre can be found among management in any other enterprise: they’re good for business, and RuPaul is nothing if not an MBA RuPublican with a flair for marketing. The second premise, that a pattern of rewarding mediocre whites at the expense of black queens is emerging just as the franchise is going mainstream and is depriving hard-working queens like Kennedy Davenport of their due, is dangerous, unjust, and doesn’t really go beyond the surface of appearances. Dangerous because it offers RuPaul an easy out: crown a black queen or queen of color (QoC), tick off a box in a corporate diversity quota, and RuPaul can cast off any accusations and come off as the reasonable one against the unhinged mob. Such a win would be unjust to the hypothetical winner, since her win would be seen as the Drag Race equivalent of a diversity hire in middle management. The goal of representation in mainstream culture was always a neoliberal trap, and with drag being mainstream, now - DRAG, its claim to fame is playing off the opposition between appearances and lived realities - representation/appearances should be nowhere near the top of anyone’s priorities as an end goal, nor should representation/appearances lay out the groundwork for our understanding of why They’re doing what they’re doing. A better comparison? Trixie and BeBe. Trixie’s deliberate choice to incorporate white blonde femininity with a country twang into her drag persona is a marketing strategy, as is her choice to downplay her indigeneity. Her choice to leverage her ability to pass as white in drag and to discuss her heritage as half Ojibwe only when prompted should be seen for what it is: brand development, and Trixie herself has said she’s nothing if not a good marketer (AS3, Ep. 5: Pop Art Ball). Consider Justin Timberlake’s failed attempt to mime rural sensibilities or Miley Cyrus’ inability to market herself to anyone: they’re all putting on personas to sell. Everyone here includes BeBe, but given her inability to pass as white, she responds to white supremacy as a power relation differently from Trixie. She embraces her minoritarian position rather than suppress it, incorporating her experiences as an immigrant from Cameroon into her drag persona. But mainstream means ‘lowest common denominator,’ and representation in mainstream culture means you have to market to them. Thus, her presence reminds this more centrist crowd that some people have war in their countries. And as Adorno says, capitalist culture isn’t meant to challenge its consumers; its production is intentionally sedating both as a means of social engineering and as a means of maximizing profit. The Center, whether in entertainment or in government (lmao Pelosi), is bourgeois. That means it sees friction as the problem, rather than the appearance of the problem, and mistakes a sense of harmony for the real thing. Trixie would not be where she is today if her drag incorporated her Ojibwe heritage the way BeBe incorporates her heritage. Such branding puts The Center too close to the violence that helped shape performers they want to consume passively, not engage with in any meaningful sense beyond what appears in front of them. To them, the process is putting on makeup in the workroom (’it’s fun! it’s positive! the drama is between them, I’m not involved!’), not Trixie embracing the insult hurled at her from childhood by her stepfather, or BeBe’s journey from Cameroon. Thus why Bebe and Trixie is a better comparison than Trixie and Sasha, or Trixie and Alaska. It tells us more about how drag got to where it is today, and how we individually go about the world negotiating all these different power relations and the demands they make in order to survive. It tells us about the limits of representation, both in understanding ourselves and our relation to the world, but also as a political priority. Identities are forged through violence, but The Center doesn’t want to be reminded of its complicity in that violence, how it negotiated to align with power, and it definitely doesn’t want to be confronted with examples of people who took a higher road than they could imagine for themselves. They only want to consume, and there’s a very clear strategy with them in mind being rewarded here. Trixie got to where she is the same way RPDR got drag to where it is - mainstream but watered down; made accessible, as it were - by suppressing those aspects that aren’t palatable to the center and performing a drag version of Harmony, no discord. They play a game we all do when we make Choices to resist, relay, or align with power. Is it fair that BeBe is considered one-note for embracing her African heritage at the same time that Trixie’s branding as a blonde country girl earns her praise as a simulacrum of Dolly Parton? No. Is it fair that queens like BeBe, Shangela, Kennedy or ChiChi are marginalized for their inability to negotiate with white supremacy, at the same time they have to work through capitalist-induced poverty? No, but that’s white supremacist capitalism for you, and while it would have been satisfying to see Shangela win, her being robbed goes beyond my satisfaction at watching her win, and even beyond Shangela’s satisfaction at winning herself. The franchise itself is aiming much higher than this. What does it say about a show that trotted out Nancy Pelosi to remind you to vote in a season set during a midterm election, a season where it set up two clear winners to fail to an established celebrity?
