ABSTRACT
Brazilian drag queen and pop star Pabllo Vittar has amassed a large social media following with fans located primarily in Latin America and the United States. With a little over 11 million followers as of February 2021, her Instagram presence includes three dominant images of herself: the hyperfeminine drag queen, the brown “androgynous gay boy” (Essinger, 2017), and the conventionally pretty White woman who is usually marketing some kind of product. Drag performances are often perceived as parodies or extravagant versions of conventional femininity (Butler, 2006; Shugart, 2001). While Vittar certainly relies on this idea of drag, which in fact propelled her to mainstream fame, her other gender and race performances are equally valuable to understand her persona. At first glance, these posts might suggest that Vittar, a Brown gender nonconforming performer, is simply embracing and reproducing White feminine beauty standards (Deliovsky, 2008). However, a closer look suggests that she might strategically embody and profit from White feminine beauty ideals while complicating cisnormative tendencies to naturalize such performances. Accordingly, I ask the following research questions: Can White femininity be used nonnormatively or strategically? What consequences does Vittar’s use of White feminine beauty standards generate? The answers to these questions aim to contribute to communication studies’ critical efforts to complicate and dismantle Western categories of gender and race.
