Ballroom culture is bad – it reconceptualizes a neoliberal orientation towards politics and engagement

In the ballroom scene, “realness” is a form of theatrics wherein performers mimic the look and demeanor of, for example, a business executive or Ivy League student. Ballroom is a performance arena developed by queer people of Color in response to pervasive racism in the 1960s and 1970s drag queen pageants in the US (Street 2016). Documentary texts Paris is Burning (1990) and My House (2018) illustrate how ballroom members linguistically use realness as an identifier for when a queer person is performatively presenting “as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “display[ing] how I blend in with other heterosexual people.” Thus, realness names a specific theatrical gender-bending methodology performers deploy at a ball to unmark their bodies as sexually queer and/or “gender nonconforming or as transgender” and visually present themselves within a racially and socioeconomically specific form of heteronormativity they do not personally embody (Bailey 2013, 59; 55). While realness is primarily used to name this specific form of ballroom performance, it also operates as a larger in-community discourse about how marginalization is effected via what Wiegman calls “economies of visibility,” or the rendering of stratification through visual observation of difference (1995, 4). In this regard, realness is an ideological outline for how marginalized people can performatively manipulate public perceptions that mark them as different. But outside the ballroom scene, mainstream entertainment and social media deploy realness with a starkly different connotation. For example, on the drag queen contest show RuPaul’s Drag Race, realness is linguistically used to denote an unusually creative or unique gender-bending look (e.g. “leprechaun realness” or “X-men weird angel devil realness”) (March 23, 2015; April 14, 2017). In fact, in an argument between Drag Race judges over the elimination of contestant Courtney Act, RuPaul identifies Act’s realistic looking heterosexual and cisgender drag character as “doing this realness thing” and Michelle Visage retorts “I don’t want real; I want a drag queen” (April 7, 2014). This article investigates the semiotic phenomenon of “realness,” specifically the difference between how ballroom members use the term and how it is engaged across popular English-language media texts. Over the last decade, realness has entered mainstream vernacular via television, entertainment news and literature, and social media. In these forums, realness takes on very different connotations than it does in the ballroom. Rookie Magazine (2012) says realness means “staying true to your roots and refusing to soften or change yourself for the dominant culture” and Redefining Realness author Janet Mock deploys it as a synonym for being “authentic, meaning who I actually am” and “proclaiming who you [are] to others” (2014, 249; 77). In these contexts, realness is not telegraphing the benefits of mimicking heteronormative identity but rather conveying the neoliberal ideology that publicly embracing one’s identity differences is economically and culturally beneficial. Certainly the meaning and application of linguistic signs shift and, in fact, some feminist theorists see term resignification projects as a critical means of altering power interests (Butler 1993; Enke 2012). But, as I will demonstrate, realness’ significant semiotic shift is neither affirmative nor neutral. Feminist resignification projects work to transform signs that are currently serving the hegemony into vehicles that enable oppressed groups to articulate power structures and form coalitions. Conversely, what I am calling “RuPaul realness” limits how marginalized populations can articulate their own modes of success, thus transforming their own cultural product into a tool that reifies the hegemonic structures that oppress them. I propose that a major reason for the multimodality of RuPaul realness stems from frequent usage on RuPaul’s Drag Race – Logo TV’s most successful show and now VH1 ratings powerhouse – and its extension to social media by the show’s producers and active fan base (Wortham 2018). Hasinoff (2008) and Thompson (2010) argue that US-based “televised talent/job search” contest shows model neoliberalism by framing successful contestants as those that understand how valuable their embodied differences are (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Neoliberal identity politics contextualizes certain capacities of self as valuable “cards” in a commercial market. Thus, contestants’ successes serve as evidence that they were “self-enterprising” and did what was necessary to advance, including fashioning parts of themselves into marketable commodities (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Brown refers to this as “human capital,” or the “economization” of subjects as their own “entrepreneurial and investment capital” (2015, 35, 33, 36). Many aspects of individual embodiment such as skin color were conceptually formulated as key human differences for the purpose of maintaining power and stratification. However, neoliberal identity politics frames oppressed differences as unique and authentic aspects of the self, and posits them as having a special capital advantage in a free market. Contestants often model neoliberal identity politics by making pride-based statements about their non-white racial or other marginalized identity designations (Hasinoff 2008, 335). I add to the literature on neoliberalism and contest television by demonstrating how this politics is communicated through the deployment of particular loaded buzzwords. On Drag Race, it happens when judges or contestants use realness as an adjective for an unusually fierce drag look or winning performance. The high frequency of realness usage on Drag Race may be due to the show’s “structured reality” format where producers shape narrative and flow (Hill 2014, 116). However, I argue that any realness statements are coproduced with contestants who desire to present themselves as likable or memorable characters. For the majority of queens that will not win Drag Race, building this notoriety directly feeds into their future career opportunities and successes. In this regard, realness is not merely a descriptor for fabulous drag but also a coded message about the commercial power of putting one’s fabulously queer self to work. In this article, I trace the semiotic shift of realness by first outlining how the term is deployed in the ballroom scene to delineate an innovative drag practice, convey cultural commentary, and articulate a minoritarian strategy of survival. I then explore how contest shows like Drag Race reflect neoliberal identity politics when they commodify minority cultural products for mass commercial consumption. To document the neoliberal context and deployment of RuPaul realness, I conduct a content and textual analysis of season 4 (the noted launch point for Drag Race’s popularity) through its most recently completed season 10 (Framke 2017). I then compare this to how realness is used in various mass media texts, including in user-generated English-language Twitter posts where keywords and hashtags are critical shorthand communication devices. My study reveals that the widespread circulation of this resignified term maintains hegemonic power practices: realness has become a polemical discourse that delegitimizes the lived realities and success methods of the very individuals that created the term.