Photo © Steven Gabriel Kareem Khubchandani is an Associate Professor at Tufts University. He is the author of the award-winning Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife, co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, and curator of Critical Aunty Studies. He also performs as LaWhore Vagistan, everyone’s favorite South Asian drag aunty.

Photo courtesy of the editor Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, academic and founding editor of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and a regular contributor to The Los Angeles Review of Books and Africa is a Country. She currently runs the Radical Books Collective which pushes for an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading.

The Austin International Drag Festival and others like it that celebrate dissident genders and desires provide an alternative to the ongoing crises around us. It was a feel-good weekend filled with virtuosic performances by Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous gender rebels, monsters, and unicorns. The joy and community-making that drag affords are life-sustaining in an ever-violent world! And particularly in a conservative state like Texas! The grassroots nature of this first-of-its-kind festival felt sweet and full of possibility. But it was overshadowed with the announcement, just weeks prior to the festival, that entertainment mogul RuPaul Charles, with production company World of Wonder, would host the first ever RuPaul’s DragCon in the Fall. Austin’s scrappy grassroots festival suddenly felt small in the face of the celebrities announced at DragCon.

Black drag queen RuPaul, whose punk androgynous style from the eighties has transformed into corporate Glamazon over thirty years, looms large in the global story of drag. Her rise to fame through her super-successful reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race and its many spinoffs has catapulted drag out of its subcultural spaces in nightclubs, cabarets, and festivals and into mainstream media. Hundreds of drag queens are now household names worldwide thanks to the show. But RuPaul and her network producers have distilled drag into a very limited form of gender performance. My hairy-chested drag would never cut it on the show. Only recently has the show welcomed trans women, trans men, cis women, and nonbinary people, though it still doesn’t include drag kings. RuPaul’s Drag Race has cast a shadow over the magnificent possibilities of performance we could call drag, foreclosing access to drag, fame, money, representation, mobility, and legibility to so many! These days, drag has to emulate what we see on Drag Race and at DragCon to be understood as drag. The empire she’s built extracts from and controls smaller pockets of creativity.

But what if drag remembered its histories of dissidence? What if drag had permission to move across categories and media? What worlds, more just and beautiful worlds, could drag make possible if it didn’t solely look like what RuPaul and her production team put out? What would drag look like if it was not in subservience to and in collusion with colonial aesthetics and knowledge forms? And can we perform decolonial critiques through drag without losing the fun, play, and pleasure drag is known for?

Photo © Steven Gabriel Kareem Khubchandani is an Associate Professor at Tufts University. He is the author of the award-winning Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife, co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, and curator of Critical Aunty Studies. He also performs as LaWhore Vagistan, everyone’s favorite South Asian drag aunty.

Photo courtesy of the editor Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, academic and founding editor of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and a regular contributor to The Los Angeles Review of Books and Africa is a Country. She currently runs the Radical Books Collective which pushes for an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading.

The Austin International Drag Festival and others like it that celebrate dissident genders and desires provide an alternative to the ongoing crises around us. It was a feel-good weekend filled with virtuosic performances by Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous gender rebels, monsters, and unicorns. The joy and community-making that drag affords are life-sustaining in an ever-violent world! And particularly in a conservative state like Texas! The grassroots nature of this first-of-its-kind festival felt sweet and full of possibility. But it was overshadowed with the announcement, just weeks prior to the festival, that entertainment mogul RuPaul Charles, with production company World of Wonder, would host the first ever RuPaul’s DragCon in the Fall. Austin’s scrappy grassroots festival suddenly felt small in the face of the celebrities announced at DragCon.

Black drag queen RuPaul, whose punk androgynous style from the eighties has transformed into corporate Glamazon over thirty years, looms large in the global story of drag. Her rise to fame through her super-successful reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race and its many spinoffs has catapulted drag out of its subcultural spaces in nightclubs, cabarets, and festivals and into mainstream media. Hundreds of drag queens are now household names worldwide thanks to the show. But RuPaul and her network producers have distilled drag into a very limited form of gender performance. My hairy-chested drag would never cut it on the show. Only recently has the show welcomed trans women, trans men, cis women, and nonbinary people, though it still doesn’t include drag kings. RuPaul’s Drag Race has cast a shadow over the magnificent possibilities of performance we could call drag, foreclosing access to drag, fame, money, representation, mobility, and legibility to so many! These days, drag has to emulate what we see on Drag Race and at DragCon to be understood as drag. The empire she’s built extracts from and controls smaller pockets of creativity.

But what if drag remembered its histories of dissidence? What if drag had permission to move across categories and media? What worlds, more just and beautiful worlds, could drag make possible if it didn’t solely look like what RuPaul and her production team put out? What would drag look like if it was not in subservience to and in collusion with colonial aesthetics and knowledge forms? And can we perform decolonial critiques through drag without losing the fun, play, and pleasure drag is known for?