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Short abstract:

Drag performers demonstrate playful approaches to countering disinformation and online harassment, including creative strategies for ensuring personal privacy and safety while maintaining highly-visible public personas and artistic expression.

Long abstract:

In recent years, drag performance has become a key target in political and cultural debates in the US and globally, with drag performers increasingly facing harassment, threats, libel, violence, and legislation that would criminalize this traditional art form. This culture-war-style backlash has been largely fueled by disinformation on social media via digital provocateurs like Libs of TikTok, which have spread use of the slur “groomer.”

However, drawing on aesthetic and political traditions within drag, performers demonstrate novel approaches to countering harassment, including creative strategies for ensuring personal privacy and safety while maintaining highly-visible public personas and artistic expression. In particular, drag performers often utilize culturally-specific brands of humor—including camp, reading, and shade—to playfully contest or dismiss their detractors. For example: drag performers have hosted fundraisers to discourage harassment by asking supporters to pledge one dollar for every hateful comment on a social media post.

This community-engaged research project draws on interviews with more than a dozen performers affiliated with the nonprofit Drag Story Hour to explore their use of playful approaches to challenging disinformation and hate speech. In so doing, the paper especially theorizes “queer play” as a cultural framework for communicating about, and challenging, the harms of contemporary digital technologies—especially for queer/trans and other marginalized communities. In so doing, it suggests opportunities for moving beyond typical discourses of inclusion, transparency, and privacy, instead drawing on vernacular queer/trans forms of communication grounded in exaggerated aesthetics, word play, and mischief.