Decolonize Drag

Drag now turns up in places its origins never suggested: AI face filters on TikTok and Snapchat, brunchtime shows, state legislatures, and political rallies. Much of that visibility traces back to RuPaul's Drag Race, a reality competition that by its fourteenth season in 2022 had become a worldwide queer phenomenon, inspiring official spinoffs and other series in many countries. But as drag reaches the mainstream through this glamorous, feminine, and market-friendly format, some forms of gender performance fall outside what we might call drag and risk being forgotten.

The book shows how gender has served as a tool of colonial rule, used to suppress certain kinds of expression, and traces how contemporary drag, including the work seen on Drag Race, both mirrors and undermines those institutional hierarchies. It centers several gender performers who push back against colonial agendas and mock them through their aesthetic choices.

A distinctive voice runs through the book: Khubchandani's drag alter ego, LaWhore Vagistan, a quick-to-judge South Asian aunty. Speaking from the experience of a working drag artist, LaWhore recounts encounters with apolitical versions of drag that leave her let down and bewildered, and she presses Khubchandani for background and analysis. Their back-and-forth frames the discussion, probing how drag, and gender more broadly, has been privatized and narrowed so that only certain people can access it. The author argues for more room to fashion gender and wider access to doing so, and considers how drag's meaning and impact shift from one part of the world to another.