Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Realness Over Reality: Analyzing Gender Binary Deconstruction In Rupaul’S Drag Race, Jonah Wilson

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

From its conception in 2009, RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) has grown incredibly in popularity, quality, and potential to serve as a mainstream way of change and acceptance for varying gender performances and identities. Particularly working within frames of commercialism, homonormativity, and queer commodification, RPDR loses a lot of its potential to serve as a radical, decentering challenge to the rest of mainstream television. In regards to rigid western ‘borders’ of gender and the gender binary, RPDR has done a considerable amount to deconstruct sociocultural boundaries that restrict individuals from presenting their gender identities and allowed a stage for transgender and …

Emerging Feminist Voices On Media And Representation, Diana Depasquale, Cassie Tenorio, Alyssa Wells, Savannah Fulmer

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies

The work featured in this panel is from students in WS2000, Introduction to Women's Studies. I created an assignment called "Choose Your Own Adventure." These projects include: an examination gender in film, and a revised version of the Bechdel Test, sexism and misogyny in gaming culture expressed through a series of comics, a painting on canvas using a variety of materials and techniques representing the control of women's reproductive rights and the damage done to female bodies by patriarchal language and rhetoric, and an analysis of womanism, scripture and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Each student engaged with issues related …