Shanté You Stay: a ocupação dos territórios midiáticos pela cultura drag

Shanté You Stay: the occupation of media territories by the drag culture

Abstract

The article starts with the understanding that there is contemporaneously a taking of media and market spaces by drag queens and their culture. This phenomenon had as its epicenter the launch of the US program RuPaul's Drag Race and its later diffusion. Even drag queens presenting a provocative blend of masculine and feminine universes in their performance of gender, market and the media, increasingly desirous of new audiences and products, appropriated this culture, adapting it and sanitizing it as a form of making it a sellable product even if it is for a niche market. The analysis begins with a genealogy of the drag culture that points these individuals as something always present in society, but which, even punctually used in previous decades, is only in the current moment that presents itself as a mediated phenomenon. Subsequently, we provide clues and conjectures that demonstrate the uniqueness and the dimension of the present media appropriation of drag queens. In the last topic, we highlight the aesthetic adaptations and the new dynamics that have been modifying the drag culture in search of bigger markets. Through this course, we understand that even drag queens may be aligned with market dynamics, drag performance itself is denunciative of the artificiality of normative relations of gender, identity and sexuality and that this mediatic achievement is useful in a way to expand the vision of previously inaccessible audiences.