Lady MAGA: A Reactionary Queer Cyborg

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ignorance and Authoritarian Epistemologies: Cyborg Surveillance States, Meme Warfare, and MAGA Drag Queens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper examines how reactionary queer figures mobilize aesthetics to produce and circulate strategic ignorance. Focusing on Lady MAGA—a drag persona who supports far-right politics and anti-trans legislation—I explore how queerness is rebranded as compatible with white nationalism, authoritarianism, and Christian supremacy. I argue that Lady MAGA functions as a cyborg pedagogue of ignorance, using queer form not for resistance but for ideological containment and epistemic distortion.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
I draw on Charles Mills’ (2007) white ignorance and Nancy Tuana’s (2006) epistemologies of ignorance to examine how affective and aesthetic forms obscure structures of power. I apply Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory (1991), especially her critique of identity as inscription and irony, to argue that Lady MAGA exemplifies the technopolitical cyborg: a hybrid of queer form and reactionary content, circulating ignorance through spectacle. I use Susan Sontag’s (1964) and Moe Meyer’s (1994) work on camp to interpret Lady MAGA’s retro-styling and theatrical drag as aesthetic excess that disorients critique. Camp, in this context, becomes not resistance but ironic disavowal.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Using McKee’s (2003) interpretive cultural textual analysis, I read Lady MAGA’s media appearances and social media content. Informed by Johnson et al. (2004), I treat these as cultural texts that produce meaning through performativity. I analyze camp performance as a rhetorical strategy where irony and exaggeration obscure political intent. Following Lather (1991), I engage in a “critical praxis that disrupts conventional meaning-making and insists on an inquiry of the margins” (p. 63), treating Lady MAGA’s hybrid identity as a site for understanding queerness in conservative politics. I follow Ellsworth (2005) in framing these as “pedagogical performances [that] do not deliver knowledge, but construct it” (p. 16).

Data sources
Primary data includes Lady MAGA’s Twitter/X posts, YouTube videos, public speeches, and interviews, along with media coverage from Rolling Stone and Vice. These are read alongside queer theory and critiques of camp to interrogate how aesthetics shape political meaning.

Results
Lady MAGA’s camp aesthetics—big wigs, 19th-century gowns, theatrical femininity—serve not resistance but white nationalist politics. Her exaggerated style enacts what Sontag (1964) called “a seriousness that fails” (p. 282), deployed as ideological distraction. Camp’s ambivalence enables hateful speech to masquerade as irony, fostering an affective pedagogy that normalizes nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and transphobia. Through Haraway’s lens, Lady MAGA is a technopolitical cyborg—“committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity ... without innocence” (1991, p. 181) but here irony reinforces domination. She exemplifies what Stanley (2011) describes as the use of queer aesthetics “to contain and neutralize the threat of gender and sexual nonnormativity” (p. 140). As Muñoz (1999) argues, queerness without collectivity is “a commodity form within neoliberal economies of consumption” (p. 9). In Lady MAGA, drag is privatized, stripped of oppositional legacy, and redeployed to affirm the systems it once contested.

Scientific or scholarly significance
This paper explores how queer aesthetics are co-opted to normalize far-right ideologies. Camp, once a tool of resistance, is retooled for ideological absorption and affective confusion. Lady MAGA exemplifies the miseducation of publics on queerness, history, and resistance.

Author

• Erik L. Malewski, Kennesaw State University