Decolonize Drag

Although imagined as a queer subcultural practice, drag seems to be everywhere we look: from AI filters on TikTok to brunchtime entertainment, from state legislations to political rallies. Yet as drag enters the mainstream—largely due to the intense, global popularity of reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race—some kinds of gender-based performance fall out of the purview of what we (could) call drag.

Decolonize Drag details the ways that gender is used as a form of colonial governance to eliminate various types of expression, and tracks how contemporary drag, including that on Drag Race, both replicates and disrupts these institutional hierarchies. This book focuses on several gender performers that resist and laugh at colonial projects through their aesthetic practices. It also features the voice of Khubchandani’s drag alter ego, judgmental South Asian aunty LaWhore Vagistan. From the firsthand perspective of a drag artist, LaWhore describes encounters with depoliticized versions of drag that leave her disappointed and perplexed, and prompts Khubchandani for context and analysis.

Their dynamic sets the tone for the book, investigating how drag—and gender more broadly—has been privatized and delimited so that it’s only available to certain people. Decolonize Drag argues for more abundance in and access to fashioning gender, and considers how drag changes meaning and efficacy as it shifts across geographies.

Read an Excerpt

The Austin International Drag Festival and others like it that celebrate dissident genders and desires provide an alternative to the ongoing crises around us. It was a feel-good weekend filled with virtuosic performances by Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous gender rebels, monsters, and unicorns. The joy and community-making that drag affords are life-sustaining in an ever-violent world! And particularly in a conservative state like Texas! The grassroots nature of this first-of-its-kind festival felt sweet and full of possibility. But it was overshadowed with the announcement, just weeks prior to the festival, that entertainment mogul RuPaul Charles, with production company World of Wonder, would host the first ever RuPaul’s DragCon in the Fall. Austin’s scrappy grassroots festival suddenly felt small in the face of the celebrities announced at DragCon.

Black drag queen RuPaul, whose punk androgynous style from the eighties has transformed into corporate Glamazon over thirty years, looms large in the global story of drag. Her rise to fame through her super-successful reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race and its many spinoffs has catapulted drag out of its subcultural spaces in nightclubs, cabarets, and festivals and into mainstream media. Hundreds of drag queens are now household names worldwide thanks to the show. But RuPaul and her network producers have distilled drag into a very limited form of gender performance. My hairy-chested drag would never cut it on the show. Only recently has the show welcomed trans women, trans men, cis women, and nonbinary people, though it still doesn’t include drag kings. RuPaul’s Drag Race has cast a shadow over the magnificent possibilities of performance we could call drag, foreclosing access to drag, fame, money, representation, mobility, and legibility to so many! These days, drag has to emulate what we see on Drag Race and at DragCon to be understood as drag. The empire she’s built extracts from and controls smaller pockets of creativity.

But what if drag remembered its histories of dissidence? What if drag had permission to move across categories and media? What worlds, more just and beautiful worlds, could drag make possible if it didn’t solely look like what RuPaul and her production team put out? What would drag look like if it was not in subservience to and in collusion with colonial aesthetics and knowledge forms? And can we perform decolonial critiques through drag without losing the fun, play, and pleasure drag is known for?

Table of Contents

About the Author

Kareem Khubchandani is an Associate Professor at Tufts University. He is the author of the award-winning Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife, co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, and curator of Critical Aunty Studies. He also performs as LaWhore Vagistan, everyone’s favorite South Asian drag aunty.