Working within the market is good, and the logic of IP is useful.

This is not to suggest that queer creators, or that queer creativity, are necessarily oppositional to market forces. Rather, some queer creators work within the logic of the market to subvert or transform it in more nuanced ways. For example, RuPaul—an internationally famous drag queen—based their career on emulating and eventually stepping in for cisgender female models.138 RuPaul’s Drag Race, a successful reality television show hosted by RuPaul in which contestants compete to become “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” started out as a spinoff of Tyra Banks’s “America’s Next Top Model”139 but has now, arguably, matched or exceeded its global cultural influence. RuPaul’s Drag Race launched the successful careers of dozens of queer creators.140 The show can be seen as an example of strategic commodification and supplantation—creating a commercially successful product and bringing greater visibility to queer voices through the machinery of the market, while arguably shifting the politics around it.141

In a similar vein, it should also be noted that queer resistance to IP does not equate to a categorical rejection of proprietary entitlements in creative works, IP law, or resistance to artists who benefit from (and often rigorously pursue) IP rights. The picture, as is often the case, is nuanced. Indeed, some queer creators exercise their IP rights; many in the queer community admire or worship artists who pursue their IP rights (and even actively support them), and, as this Article itself demonstrates, many queer communities and creative spaces maintain clear proprietary norms around intellectual creations.