Rupaul's DragU & Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp"

The episode I watched was Rupaul's DragU "The Family that Drags Together" and after I read Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp", I found several statements that described the episode. In the episode, the drag queens were the professors at DragU, and the three “students” were their relatives. Manila Luzon was teaching her sister, Jujubee was also with her sister, and Raven was teaching her mom. As I mentioned in a comment on an earlier post regarding Sontag's quote, “camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious,” it applies to the entire concept presented in this episode in that the family members are "completely naïve" about the drag lifestyle, while the drag queens are the ones who are "wholly conscious". The drag queens, as professors, teach the naïve "students" about how to be more confident and glamorous.

Sontag writes in her essay, “Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” This quote epitomizes the drag lifestyle in that the clothes and makeup the drag queens wear in the episode, and the way they do their hair is a bit exaggerated, but that is what makes it that inside code of identity that the “clique” of drag queens have in common. Sontag also explains that, “Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” This explains an idea behind drag in that in order to become what they perceive as attractive, male drag queens, who were the professors transformed themselves to become much more feminine. Another statement in Sontag's essay that really resonates with the episode is, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” The drag queens in the episode teach the students to essentially play a role. They improve their clothing, their style, hair, makeup, and even work on the way they walk. All this preparation truly resembles that required for a theater performance. The drag costume and attitude is a performance for the three students. They are essentially putting on this act and even in doing in the lip-sync competition/performance to see who can play the role best to get the best “DPA” (drag point average) in order to draguate at the top of their “class”.