My basic understanding of drag and gender in entertainment started my freshman year of high school. The first time I was exposed to drag was watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show, starring Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon. I will never forget dancing to the Time Warp with my mom and experiencing unorthodox gender norms for the first time. It was not until my first year of college when I started to learn more about drag. During the spring semester of my freshman year, my friend and I would watch RuPaul’s Drag Race in her apartment waiting to go to class. When we watched RuPaul, we did not just watch the current season, we would be watching as many seasons as possible, so I would be able to catch up and know all of the popular Queens. The first Queen that I fell in love with on RuPaul’s was Raven, the runner up from season two, or as I like to say, the real winner of season two. The more I started getting into the show, my desire to see the Queens in person grew. …show more content…
The first Queen that I was able to see in person was Katya, from season seven, at Pulse Nightclub. After watching Katya’s performance, I knew that there was no turning back from loving the drag scene. As time passed, I would attend different shows at Parliament House to see more queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race, such as Naomi Smalls, Thorgy Thor, and Bob the Drag Queen. When attending the shows, watching the Queens and other onlookers around the club express themselves; it helped me realize how much I appreciate the art and how it has allowed people to be true to themselves and their identity. The understanding of gender identity that the LGBTQ+ community and drag community present has taught me so much about the person who I want to be when I become an adult in the real world. The amount of love and respect that is exemplified by RuPaul and the community has allowed me to become the ally that I want to
Queen Latifah is an African American female MC turned TV and movie actress. Her raps and or songs served different social purposes and her focus has remained unbreakable. Latifah’s values could and can be heard in her music. Latifah was skilled at her craft and was able to reach out and connect with her intended audience. It is a known fact that Queen Latifah’s music is deeply connected to the women’s empowerment movement.
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Since America’s Next Top Model gave a label to all the contestants in the show based on their race, ethnicity and cultural background, they were all expected act in a certain way. For instance, “because she always wants to feature another “black bitch” ── especially of the ratings-generating “ghetto” variety ── Banks brought Tiffany back for the fourth season, after she’d been through anger management classes.”(Pozner). Also “a black teenager thinks she’s hot until America’s Next Top Model’s judges convince her she’s an ugly ape,”(Pozner). Clearly, after participating in America’s Next Top Model, most its contestants were broken, taken apart and and sometimes put back together in a completely different way. Contestants on this show were treated more as an object rather than as a human being with morals, values and
In this paper, I will examine how women of color who deal with the lack of acceptance growing up because of their lesbianism help shape and/or will shape them to be future role models for LGBT people around the world. I will be using the coming of age drama, Pariah, directed and written by Dee Rees, as a primary source in order to argue how the cinematography in this film portrays Alike being the epitome of embracing one 's sexuality. I chose this film because it reminded me of a similar story that touched me in the form of a book written by Audre Lorde called Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Standing up in what Alike believed in and taking a stand by fighting back against so many in the community deal with on a everyday basis is the driving force I will use to show how she took a big giant step
Media and Reality TV isn’t just affecting the older audience, it’s also affecting young girls. Fueled by reality TV, it is estimated that 250,000 girls participate in more than 5,000 beauty pageants each year (Hollandsworth 491). The popularity of beauty pageants for little girls has increased dramatically in the last 50 years due to many things including Disney. Disney has “reportedly made 4 billion dollars annually from its more than 26,000 princess related retail items” (492). It started in 1954 with the first televised broadcast of the Miss America Pageant, which was the first child beauty pageant (492). It was a very popular broadcast with over a million viewers (492). The pageant started a movement of child beauty pageants all over the
The NYRF protest critiqued both the representation side of the behavioral expectation of “traditional women” as well as the structural side of the obstacles that women faced within social institutions such as labor and educational opportunities. With the representative side “traditional women” promoted by the Miss American Pageant, it reinforced women’s submissive and sexist inferiority and racial beauty criteria within the structural side to be approval by men. However, there was intersectionality in the structural obstacles and representation side extending the social discrimination based on
Butler herself wrote about the film in her response to critics of her work. In her essay “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion” she tells those who question her ideas about the utility of drag to subvert gender that “there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and the reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms” (Butler 384). Gay men (or anyone) who dresses in drag might, by aggressively portraying stereotypical over-the-top depictions of gender performance, serve to reify the conception of gender they seek to subvert both by reaffirming those stereotypical beliefs and also by allowing their performance to make clear that drag is an imitation, without indicating that gender itself is an imitation. In Gender Trouble Butler writes that all gender is performance. As drag is a form of gender performance it could be said that all gender is drag.
Aside from being a beauty queen and a ballerina, Lee is also an outspoken activist. She raves how the Miss Black USA pageant helps serve women of color by helping them achieve their education and academic goals. The real reason many women join pageants is not really because they want to achieve a beauty status but it is actually to gain money for scholarship. Most are trying to finish college while others are pursuing a master’s degree.
The dragster car is a race car that is for drag racing, racing that is two or more cars racing for a short distance. We are starting a unit on drag racing to learn about acceleration and other things such as mph and speed. This will help if we wish to be an engineer or mechanic for cars. Basically anything that transportation-wise. The actually term of drag racing is because unlike other racing sports, drag-racing is racing over a short distance with more than, at least one car. Students race these model cars because, one, for enjoyment or for training to become an auto-mechanic or engineer like stated earlier. The dragster is also run off things like CO2. Also, they give a chance for the students to be able to design their own car, thus making for
The portrayal of many stereotypes in a cliche set of fake, made up, pageant girls within Libba Bray’s novel, Beauty Queens, surprisingly moves away from this idea of satire when looking at the bare bones of the storyline. It’s a simple story of women, moving past the patriarchy they’ve been raised where beauty is everything, growing into who they truly are and celebrating their differences as humans, all while surviving being stranded on an island.
African American women have been purposefully written out of visual history with the exception of scripted roles that have been predetermined by stereotypical scripts that are imbedded in the collective psyche of American audiences beginning in the 1890s. Dorothy Dandridge was a sensational performer that commanded attention and left her audiences awestruck on screen and in life. At the age of eleven, I recall sitting in front of the television for a special televised movie, called “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.” The film opens with a somber score and voiceover of Dorothy (Halle Berry) asking the audience, “Have you ever caught sight of yourself by accident… And, you see yourself from the outside… That’s who you really are… That question captured my wondering eleven-year-old mind and immediately pulled me into the world of a woman who was familiar to me. She was familiar in her storytelling and questioning even before an image broke the continuity of credits on flashing on the screen. My mother has always loved mirrors. In one room there would be at least two mirrors suspended on the walls. I have caught many glimpses of myself over the years, so I knew exactly what she meant in asking the question. It’s a question that continues to be answered by Hollywood of black women, but without their input or consent. The question is why?
The moment i see my uncle John driving down my long bumpy road, my heart starts pumping. My family and i have been cleaning all day long. I made Uncle John's favorite cookies, lastly Mother made a bed in the spare room for him to sleep on. Once the jobs were done, we waited. My uncle John has put a positive impact into my life because he always bring me fishing. John and i always go to the mud run every single year and he always seems to make me the most happy girl alive.
Those who do not appropriate the reflection of sexiness and youth will be a social outcast. Specifically, the show targets a lot of these women to feel disgusted with how they look. Reality shows like these want our society to feel an unending burn and desire to be more beautiful at the cost of our own character. Reality shows want us to fuel their personal agenda, so we can continue to buy into beautifying products, such as anti-aging lotions, too-good-to-be-true products, to eventually cosmetic surgery. Consequently, women will reflect the character and image Sheila portrays. Society wants to be pretty, but a lot of them will never get “there” because media and television pressures us to always do more and more to improve our physical
African American females are usually given the characteristics of someone who is either loudmouthed, an angry black women, tough, ghetto, a single mother/ “baby mommas” who are in the lower class society, or someone who is dirty (Shields) (The Huffington Post). When it comes to the media, black women are misinterpreted negatively and it’s time for society to change this depiction of them. But how do we do this? Instead of the media making African American women “baby mommas” and “angry black women”, they should portray them as successful beautiful women. Writer Shonda Rhimes in fact does portray African American women positively and empower them within the roles they play in television shows. Rhimes is the writer of Scandal, which is a television show with a strong African American female who’s main character is Kerry Washington but known as Olivia Pope in the show. Pope is a strong, highly-educated and successful black women who is the CEO of Pope& Associates and knows what she wants in life (The Huffington Post). Many African American females look up to her as well as other young women. They love the strong attitude she attributes to herself and how she is a business women with confidence and dresses to impress at all times. If more writers of television shows or movies gave African American women strong female roles like
In the words of RuPaul, one of the most well known drag queens in todays times, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else.” Since the 1500s, men can be seen dressing up as women for entertainment and comedic effect, but since then drag has evolved from just grand performances to a symbol for acceptance and individuality. Recently, drag has been dissected and looked at under a microscope by those who only see what is on the sparkly surface. What has been found is that drag culture is much more that its initial appearance, but that there is an entire set of values that define what drag truly is, one of which, and probably the most popular, is being confident in ones identity. Being able to take on an alter