ABSTRACT
More important than where RuPaul’s Drag Race is now, or where it will appear next, we ask questions about the global contexts in which drag culture exists before, during and after Drag Race. We ask historical questions about the characteristics and development of drag culture in geo-political contexts before Drag Race defined the global paradigms of drag. Conversely, we ask questions about how drag culture in geo-political contexts has been shaped by Drag Race. We also ask questions about how drag culture has assumed local, global, political, economic and queer contours in relation to and despite Drag Race’s universalizing model. Drag Race has co-existed as reality-television and social-media phenomena, which have populated a global, digital media sphere in which drag performance is further commercialized and de/re-constructed in ways that append and depart from the television series. Thus, we interrogate how drag has materialized globally in online spaces, in tandem with and apart from Drag Race, such that a large part of digital, global space has become performative drag space. In conceiving of a post-Drag Race, global digital sphere, we cannot leave behind Drag Race itself for its merits and limitations in a number of discursive and critical respects that guide this volume and its contributions.
