Saturday, September 29, 2012

10.05 - Carl Schottmiller

Please join us for the first Chew on This of the Fall Quarter 2012!!

Carl Schottmiller
Tuesday, October 9 at 12pm
Kaufman Conference room 160

 ‘The Shade of it All’:
RuPaul, ‘Camp Capitalism,’ and the race to redeļ¬ne drag


With her reality show RuPaul's Drag Race, RuPaul creates a new field of cultural production tha redefines drag in her image. By decontextualizing and repurposing material from Paris is Burning, RuPau uproots drag from its community based activist-oriented origins and repackages the art form as self-centered, materialistic endeavor in whihc only gay man participate. As her reality show grows in popularity and disseminates this distorted understanding of a vast art form, Drag Race erases alternate, more subversive modes of gender identification and performance.

Carl Schottmiller is a Ph.D student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.  With a BA in Women’s Studies & English and a MA in Folklore, he utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the connections among gender performance, folklore, and social activism.

His current project analyzes how drag performers generate community-based, activist-oriented kinship systems as alternatives to an ineffective, heteronormative nuclear family model.