Core 4: Sabina

 I've been thinking a lot about Anna McCarthy’s “Reality Television: a Neoliberal Theater of Suffering” and how much it relates to my own work on RuPaul's Drag Race. I kind of alluded to this in the group post about Reality TV, but I wanted to take a moment and expand on it. In that post, I talked about contestant Roxxxy Andrews sharing that she was left at the bus stop by her birth mother and raised by her grandmother. Expanding on the theater of suffering, I have this idea that reality television fans love to consume personal crisis. I use the word “consume” here to reference the actions of a vocal subsection of the fanbase that feels entitled to the contestants’ lives and, as such, treat them as inconsequential commodities instead of whole, individual, people.Where the consumption and the exploitation of crisis becomes overt is post-viewing when the audience is free to react to the episode. When I searched Google for “Roxxxy Andrews bus stop speech” to remind myself what exactly she said, the first video that popped up was “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL”. This is a 16 second fan-edited video with 164,000 views that splits Roxxxy Andrews’ speech with a previous video of RuPaul laughing while saying, “That’s funny, tell it again!”. Recommended videos included “Roxxxy Andrews/Say So mashup” and “8 Most Emotional Moments on RuPaul’s Drag Race” but I couldn’t find a video that showed the scene as it aired on Logo without ultimately turning to Netflix. What this tells me is that something in the production is allowing the queens to be treated as a product meant for consumption. The authenticity of whatever the moment is doesn’t matter, the trauma doesn’t matter - what matters to production is how viral and sensational (memeable) the moment is, translating to the audience that the queens are an endless commodity. 

When read through a critical lens, the “Bus stop roxxxy Andrews LOL” video is a reflection of Drag Race’s exploitation of trauma and the way fans will react: the audience comes to expect a traumatic storyline and fanvideo RuPaul applauds Roxxxy for making this happen and producing the scene, knowing that it will be it viral moment asking her to “tell it again”. A reliance on traumatic events to create a good storyline is inherent to reality television, sure, but the way Drag Race churns out the personal trauma storyline reveals (ru-veals) how the show exploits trauma from contestants of color and prioritizes the white queens over other contestants, unequally creating racial differences within editing practices.