Queer In Pop Culture

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Popular culture is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon. Because a piece of popular culture can only be defined by the medium’s appeal to the ordinary person, it is difficult to address what is and what is not popular (Grindstaff 2008). Within popular culture itself exists sub and counter cultures, further contributing to the intangibility of what makes a medium part of pop culture. While queer identity and art has started to emerge more in the traditional popular culture mediums of television, film and literature, being queer is still seen as an underground cultural positioning (LadyClever 2014).

Fictional queer characters in the aforementioned popular culture mediums have been given increasingly prominent and complex storylines in their …show more content…

The reality television show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” (essentially a drag parody of America’s Next Top Model) has built up a significant following of young, heterosexual female fans. The show, and drag in general, has become a kind of cultural phenomenon over the past five years. While it could be argued that the increase in popularity of a show centring around queer and gender-non conforming people is due to an increase in acceptance of those identities, it is likely due to more complicated factors. Balzer (2005) argues that the popularity of drag and the increase in acceptance and appreciation for queer art is due to both cultural globalisation and the erasure of drag queens’ sexuality. It is possible that straight audiences are able to embrace drag to such an extent because drag queens are performing the identity of a straight woman. Straight consumers of Drag Race can interpret the performance of femininity by cis gendered gay men as an illusion of a cis-gendered straight woman. This interpretation of the illusion created by drag queens erases the inherent queerness of drag as an art form. This implication points to the question of whether the presence of straight people in queer fandom and the inclusion of queer art in popular culture dilutes the values and meaning of queer identity.

In her performance on SNL last month, Katy Perry

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