Open AccessMundus Vult Decipi RuPaul’s Drag Race as Part of the Culture Industry
Author(s) -
Eelke André Verhagen
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
via panorâmica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2182-9934
pISSN - 1645-9652
DOI - 10.21747/2182-9934/via10_2a5
Subject(s) - race (biology) , popular culture , audience measurement , culture industry , drag , perspective (graphical) , sociology , pessimism , skew , product (mathematics) , aesthetics , warrant , gender studies , advertising , epistemology , social science , economics , media studies , computer science , engineering , art , philosophy , business , mathematics , telecommunications , visual arts , geometry , aerospace engineering , financial economics
In this article I examine the ways in which the competitive reality television franchiseRuPaul’s Drag Race(RPDR), immensely popular withWestern LGBTQ+-communities, can be considered a product of what Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer identified as the Culture Industry (CI). On the one hand,this allows for a concrete application of the CI-thesis and the exploration of possible lines of critique concerning RPDR and its effects on its viewership, while,on the other hand,it is an opportunity to evaluate the aptitude of the CI-thesis for critical analysis in the 21st century. While the concepts related to the CI-thesis turn out to be remarkably productive, its latent totalitarian and pessimistic framework tends to skew any analysis. This may warrant supplementing its coarse-grained perspective with a more fine-grained empirical investigation