Reading Is Fundamental

With the meteoric rise in popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race, fans have begun to create their own content on digital platforms. This chapter explores the phenomenon of the “Ru-Cap,” remixed episodes of Drag Race that interpolate clips from each episode with intertextual references to other parts of the Drag Race universe, drag culture writ large, and queer culture overall. Artists such as Lee Dawson have created these Ru-Caps as texts that privilege queer knowledge through mechanisms common in other forms of fan fiction. Each participant in the fandom engaging with the Ru-Caps brings a unique reading of the texts, both of Drag Race and the Ru-Cap. As we know, reading is fundamental, and it is through these textual interpretations that fans are celebrating and challenging the mainstreaming of Drag Race and drag culture by creating the Ru-Cap subculture. In these exchanges, artist and viewer become part of hermeneutic circles where the content of the Ru-Cap, its meaning, and its relationship to the broader canons of Drag Race and queer culture are shaped with social media dialogue; artists produce work that is interpreted and critiqued by a wide audience which in turn inspires future work. This process helps to develop, define, and refine shared or collective memory that links Drag Race to its audience and their experiences, solidifying a text that in itself documents queer culture and even provides a sense of shared, public “herstory.”