Given my interest in cross dressing—my scholarly interest, to be clear; one of my articles is even titled Cross Dressing and the Criminal—it perhaps comes as no surprise that I’m a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the campy, loopy, and entirely addictive reality show on the Logo Network and VH-1 in which drag queens compete to see who will be America’s next top drag superstar. What may come as a surprise is how much the show reminds me of being a law professor.
The thing about drag, after all, is it reminds us that so much of what we do, including gender, is performance. This is one of Judith Butler’s points in Gender Trouble, of course, but I actually prefer the way RuPaul puts it: “You’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”
What does this have to do with being a law professor? It seems that so much of what we do, especially those of us pre-tenure, is performance. Indeed, for many of us, the line between performance and impersonation is a fine one indeed. Consider my post from last summer, Clothes Make the Man, which essentially asked, What should a law professor wear on the first day of class, especially a young professor who does not look “naturally professorial”? On a certain level, I was really asking, What steps do we take to look real, i.e., like a real professor? Just as the contestants on RuPaul’s drag race don clothes and makeup to perform gender, we too perform to a certain extent, donning tweed jackets with patches or professional pantsuits, hoping we can pass as the real thing: a real teacher, a real scholar. (Some of us, in the process, are even subverting what it means to be a professor, just as many drag queens subvert the very notion of gender as a fixed identity, or as natural.) Is it any wonder then that I like the parallels between the show, especially RuPaul’s infamous catchphrases, and what we do? At the start of each class, I can almost hear RuPaul insisting: “Charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent!” When I present papers at workshops, I can almost hear RuPaul warning, “And remember: Don’t fuck it up!” My students and colleagues may as well be the panel of judges on the show. And each year, after student evaluations, and the unwritten but even more significant evaluations from my colleagues, I sigh, think about tenure, and can almost hear RuPaul’s intoning, “Chante, you stay. You are still in the running…”
Perhaps I’m unique in thinking about RuPaul’s Drag Race as I teach. But I can’t be the only law professor who thinks about the academy as a reality show, right? So I’m curious. What reality show do others think about when they think about the academy?
Posted by Bennett Capers on June 14, 2010 at 01:02 PM
Comments
As Professor Douglas J. Whaley wrote in “Teaching Law: Thoughts on Retirement” (68 Ohio St. L.J. 1387 (2007)), “…sometimes you have to get out your cane and hat and dance for the students.” The dancing I can do; however, I’m a little worried about lip syncing for my life to some other prawf’s amazing lecture for throwing too much shade or reading my students too much during Socratic questioning….
Posted by: anonnewprof | Jun 18, 2010 1:53:44 PM
Getting back to the reality show analogy, I won’t speak for myself, but I certainly have colleagues for whom the “reality” show “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here” would seem to fit. I haven’t seen the show but the title sure fits.
Posted by: anon | Jun 15, 2010 4:30:39 PM
Of course Kenji is building on Goffman’s work, and I was actually thinking how apt Kenji’s covering idea is for classroom performances. We downplay certain aspects of our identity, and emphasize others, all in an effort to manage how we are received. Glenn, I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to political views. I take extra steps in an effort to keep my students guessing about my politics, in part because I don’t want politics to get in the way of teaching, and in part because I don’t want to be pigeonholed. Perhaps neither of these reasons is sufficient. I don’t know, but you raise a good point.
Posted by: Bennett Capers | Jun 15, 2010 4:27:19 PM
They are not Kenji Yoshino’s terms. They are Erving Goffman’s terms. See, e.g., Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.
Posted by: Anon | Jun 15, 2010 11:31:46 AM
Bennett, great post (and perhaps the inaugural RuPaul reference on Prawfsblawg?). One interesting question I had was to use Kenji Yoshino’s terms in Covering, whether you think of your performance here (in the class, in front of the faculty) more like “passing” or more like “covering”? One area where I think a lot of us cover if not pass in the classroom has to do with our political beliefs, and at some level I wonder whether that’s healthy and good pedagogy or instead obfuscatory and supportive about views about the impartiality/objectivity of legal results that many of us would eschew. I was also intrigued by the ambivalence in the comparison to the drag analogy — for the Drag Race contestants drag is fun, and if anything the pressure is *not* to perform in this way in every day life, such that drag is the liberation not the satisfying of social norms. By contrast, your description of the performance *you* are called on to do is much more deeply ambivalent…
Posted by: I. Glenn Cohen | Jun 15, 2010 9:42:23 AM