![]() In many such scenes, the act of lip-syncing is a self-consciously camp device, something that links it strongly with drag performance (as exemplified by the lip-sync battles on Ru Paul's Drag Act). Other lip-syncs, meanwhile, open up affects rather different from the comedic, such as abjection (Mulholland Drive), or simply the bizarre (The Singing Detective). Such scenes (and similar occasions in television, YouTube videos, and stage performances) very often have results that are queer (La mala educación/Priscilla Queen Of The Desert), or comedic (Bridget Jones’s Diary/Love Actually), or-with striking frequency-some combination of the two (Austin Powers in Goldmember). There is a particular kind of scene, though, in which lip-syncing is not an illusory act to deceive an audience, but an openly deployed device with particular purposes and effects/affects. ![]() ![]() Outside of the cinema, more than one musical scandal has emerged when a performing artist or group is revealed to have been lip-syncing to voices other than their own. Lip-syncing has been an important element of cinema for probably as long as sound and vision have been integrated in the medium in musical films in particular, singers have provided their voices for non-singing actors who lip-sync to construct an illusion of their vocal ability. Thinking with an analytics of camp suggests how AIDS activists employed religious imagery in ways that confound the very division between Catholic and anti-Catholic, religious and secular. This essay expands the archive of the culture wars-and of queer and Catholic history-to include another form of religious engagement: the use of camp. It locates American AIDS activism at the center of religious and sexual narratives to question the range of subjects that become visible as “religious.” Second, reading Like a Prayer as part of the archive of modern Catholicism exposes scholarly assumptions about the relationships between religion and politics, sincerity and performance, religion and secularism. First, it challenges the culture wars distinction between secular progressivism and religious conservatism that haunts histories of religion and sexuality. This essay examines the 1990 documentary Like a Prayer, emphasizing performances by Chicano AIDS activist Ray Navarro, to reassess two prevailing narratives in religion and politics. Situating RuPaul’s Drag Race Studies within this larger academic history allows scholars to expand the current field without repeating/perpetuating scholarly errors that undermine the study. By discussing how drag scholars have discussed/approached these debates, I seek to provide a framework for contemporary drag scholars to evaluate how their research projects fit into this larger history. Any submissions will be rightly acknowledged, giving due credit to those who send me resources. While I have tried to bring together all the available published scholarship on Camp, I am asking interested readers to add/revise this list by emailing me additional scholarly resources. My hope is to create a growing Camp scholarship Works Cited page that can be a useful resource for scholars interested not only in RuPaul’s Drag Race specifically but drag and Camp scholarship more generally. One of my goals is to provide Drag Race scholars with a bibliographic resource for Camp studies. For this presentation, I am going to focus on the first point-the politics of our Bibliographies. My goal in creating this Primer is to connect Drag Race Studies to the larger history of academic drag studies in order to reflect on three key areas: What works we cite, What research methods we use, and How we account for our scholarly positionalities. With my presentation, I start to organize an “Introduction to Drag Studies” primer that will develop into an expanded article. This history (and the debates within) provide invaluable resources for scholars to consider the social, cultural, and political implications of how we study and theorize drag. While this emerging discourse can push drag studies into new directions, scholars analyzing RuPaul’s Drag Race should also position their projects within the larger history of drag scholarship. The growing field of “Drag Race Studies” heralds exciting possibilities for understanding the cultural production and consumption of drag in the 21st century. The unprecedented commercial success of RuPaul’s Drag Race has seemingly reignited scholarly interest in drag. ![]() From various disciplines, scholars analyze drag as a way to address larger social and political questions faced by marginalized communities. From Esther Newton’s ethnography of female impersonators to Judith Butler’s theorization of gender performativity, drag performance has consistently served as a source of scholarly inquiry and debate within academia.
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