“Haute couture? More like haute glue!”

Abstract

Reading is a unique interactional practice in the drag queen community. It refers to leveling witty and often cutthroat mock insults at fellow drag queens, with an aim of throwing shade. In this paper, I examine the discourse of the ‘reading challenge’, a staple of RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR), an internationally popular drag queen reality TV show (2009–). In the first part, I review central concepts surrounding drag performance and the phenomenon of RPDR and summarize relevant sociolinguistic literature about drag queen speech and the practice of reading. In the second part, I describe the RPDR reading challenge as a unique discursive genre and analyse its performative structure, themes, and most prominent strategies that queens use to construct felicitous reads and throw shade. The analysis demonstrates that this genre relies on camp language and highly ritualized, repetitive, and recontextualized performance of reading, framed by requirements of mass-consumed reality TV.