{"id":1153,"date":"2025-02-28T14:39:19","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T14:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/?p=1153"},"modified":"2025-02-28T14:39:19","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T14:39:19","slug":"celebrating-the-launch-of-drag-as-marketplace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/2025\/02\/28\/celebrating-the-launch-of-drag-as-marketplace\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating the launch of Drag as Marketplace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Mario Campana<\/em><\/a> is one of the co-editors of the new book <\/em>Drag as Marketplace: Contemporary Cultures, Identities and Business<\/em><\/a>, along with <\/em>Dr Mikko Laamanen<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Dr Maria Rita Micheli<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Dr Rohan Venkatraman<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and <\/em>Dr\u00a0Katherine Duffy<\/em><\/a>. We celebrated the book\u2019s launch during LGBT+ History Month 2025 with a panel discussion event at the School of Management, featuring RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race UK star <\/em>Le Fil<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

We spoke to Mario, Maria Rita and Mikko about the tensions and triumphs that have accompanied drag\u2019s move to the main stage. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Maria Rita Micheli (I\u00c9SEG School of Management):<\/strong> \u201cThe fact that we editors have been working on diversity and inclusion themes for a while was something that brought us together. The idea of writing a book instead of a of a paper was that it could be a channel that allowed us to speak to wider audiences.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the book, we're talking about drag becoming a mainstream phenomenon and a market phenomenon \u2013 so it made sense to talk about these issues in a format that was more digestible than an academic paper. It also has a wider reach thanks to libraries, so students can read it, or even simply people beyond academia who are interested in the topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mario Campana (University of Bath School of Management):<\/strong> \u201cWe had a bit more freedom, as well, in terms of the kinds of discussion we could have in different chapters: we could put together a very diverse team of authors. Some of these topics would probably be quite tough to publish in an academic paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mikko Laamenen (Oslo Metropolitan University):<\/strong> \u201cThe way we in which we sold the book to the publisher was with the argument that there isn't a book like this on the market.\u00a0And there truly isn't. We didn't want to just to focus on drag queens, but more broadly on\u00a0the phenomenon of drag \u2013 these days, basically anyone can do drag.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere isn't a book that looks at how markets and market devices come together with the phenomenon of drag. Although if we look at what drag is at the moment, it\u2019s very much mixed with all of the phenomena that we would typically look at when we study consumer culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think in the original discussion back in 2021, where we came together with Mario to discuss the book, he was actually proposing that we do a conference sub-theme or track. I said that if we're going to go through all of this work, we might as well put it into a book!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mario:<\/strong> \u201cOne chapter is about drag in Germany, and focuses on one specific type of drag. It's more fringe drag \u2013 the type that in the US would be called the club kids \u2013 performers that do more of the weirdest forms of drag.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite interesting, the relationship this has with mainstream drag.\u00a0They need each other to survive. For example, mainstream drag needs these subcultures to innovate, while fringe performers need mainstream drag to attract people to their show because otherwise they don't make money.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThat kind of relationship \u2013 the tension between who's legitimate or who's not legitimate in the market \u2013 is fascinating.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrag has been going on since Shakespeare, but effectively RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race really helped to bring it to the to the fore.\u00a0Of course, as soon as you marketise something and capitalise on it, then you lose a lot of the meanings that were attached to it and some people are even more stigmatised than before.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mikko:<\/strong> \u201cRuPaul himself says that the show originally was created as America's Got Talent meets Project Runway meets other kinds of reality shows: the time was right to bring something like that to the market.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s as innovative as it as it gets, and very successful \u2013 but even aside from that that, what Drag Race really has achieved is that it has brought forth the \u2018authentic\u2019 representation of drag queens. In mainstream culture, rarely has drag ever been represented by people who actually do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maria Rita:<\/strong> \u201cIn the book\u2019s conclusion, we developed this framework to summarise what we have in the chapters, talking about important themes of legitimisation, stigmatisation and commodification of drag. We try to pull all these things together to try to understand: after the mainstream-isation of drag, what is going on? What's next? If we want to understand the evolution of drag as a market or as a cultural product, where should we look?<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, one of the most surprising things in the book was seeing drag in contexts that aren\u2019t the traditional or mainstream ones that we see on TV or at drag shows. But then,\u00a0if we think carefully about it, this shouldn't be anything surprising!\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mikko:<\/strong> \u201cOne of the positive things that RuPaul\u2019s Drag race has brought to society is in a concept called \u2018teaching the children\u2019.\u00a0It\u2019s bringing that sort of spoken history, that experience of being part of the community forward. It has a very positive effect in a sense of offering an outlet where gay youth or queer youth can see that it's not happening just to them, and that there is a long lineage here.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mario:<\/strong> \u201cI was talking to this with one of our chapter authors earlier. She said that they had the first book on consumption and feminist and gender studies 15 years ago.\u00a0They had a similar initial idea, the diverse chapters and things like that. And since then, the field has exploded and is still going strong.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you know, hopefully we in ten years we will be at the stage at which we'll do this again and say, \u2018This is how it\u2019s changed in ten years\u2019!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Mario Campana is one of the co-editors of the new book Drag as Marketplace: Contemporary Cultures, Identities and Business, along with Dr Mikko Laamanen, Dr Maria Rita Micheli,\u00a0Dr Rohan Venkatraman\u00a0and Dr\u00a0Katherine Duffy. We celebrated the book\u2019s launch during LGBT+...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1377,"featured_media":1154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[103,152,13,38,148,193],"tags":[305,308,231,356,306],"class_list":["post-1153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversity","category-equality","category-gender-equality","category-human-rights","category-marketing","category-markets","tag-drag","tag-drag-race","tag-lgbt","tag-lgbt-history-month","tag-lgbtq"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/133\/2025\/02\/dragblog1.JPG.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4Pj1-iB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1377"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}