RuPaul and the In/visibility of Fashion and Popular Media

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Popular Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Fashion, like media, offers the unique possibility to address aesthetics, ethics and social power relations all in one. As with media, fashion involves bodies, rituals, material reality as much as fantasy, imagination and creativity. Both, for nearly two decades now, have been defined as part of the creative industries, those key economic activities that derive their economic value first and foremost from their symbolic rather than their material value. This suggests a lack of robustness: that these are luxury goods and therefore suspect. Querying how media and fashion are understood will show how the current regard for the creative industries is predicated on modernity’s deeply split roots. On the one hand there is the critical and rational lineage of Enlightenment thought, on the other romantic sensitivity and openness to magic and creativity. RuPaul’s Drag Race will serve as focal point.

Author

• Joke Hermes, Inholland U