RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy

Hendrik Kempt is a Research Associate, FoKoS, University Siegen in Germany. He has authored several forthcoming articles on morality and AI. Megan Volpert is the author of many books on communication and popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists. After seven years as a nationally competitive debater, she competed in poetry slams for several more. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Louisiana State University and she writes regularly for PopMatters. She has been teaching high school English in Atlanta for over a decade and was 2014 Teacher of the Year. She edited the American Library Association-honored anthology This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching. She is co-editor of RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy (2020). Foreword author Kate Bornstein is known as the original "Gender Outlaw."

CONTENTS Foreword by Sasha Velour Introduction 1. That's All! The Incompossible Vixen by Kyler Chittick 2. We're All Born Naked and the Rest Is Drag by Oliver Norman 3. Exploring drag culture and performance with Friedrich Nietzsche by Ben Glaister 4. Fire WERK With Me: Media Subcultures Crossover into Meta-Entertainment by Carolina Are 5. Playing with Glitter by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Mariana Zarate, and Leonardo Acosta 6. You Want to be Anonymous? You Better Work by Alice Fox 7. Like God in Drag by Julie van der Wielen, Alice van der Wielen, and Anna Heuer Hansen 8. Performance and the Real by Dawn Gilpin and Peter Nagy 9. RuPaul's Drag Race as Femme-Queer Utopia Reality by Samantha Wesch 10. Searching for Reality in Drag Race by Sandra Ryan 11. Debunking the Femininity of Female Impersonation by Holly Onclin 12. Reading Is Fundamental by Lucy McDonald 13. The Origins of Self-Love by Anna Fennell 14. Eliminate Your Strongest Competition? The Social Dynamics of All Stars by Marta Sznajder 15. If You Can't Love Yourself: On Drag and Vulnerability by Anneliese Cooper 16. Drag Queens and Mall Santas: Performing and Performing Performance by Benjamin Stalnaker 17. Lip-Sync for Your Life by Guilel Treiber 18. The Library Is Open: The Ethics of RuPaul's Reading by Rutger Birnie 19. RuPaul Is a Better Warhol: Pop and the Ethical Judgment of Realness by Megan Volpert 20. Flazeda and the Meaning of Words by Hendrik Kempt Bibliography About the Authors Index