Dragging Jotería: Fumbling Toward the Jota/x Undercommons

• In Event: Drag Infrastructures: Networks of Gender Expansive Resistance

Abstract

La Más Draga is a Mexican reality competition TV series featuring drag performers as they face weekly challenges to win the title, “The Most Drag” (i.e., La Más Draga in Spanish). With five seasons transmitted via YouTube on Wednesday nights, the show has not only garnered a wide viewership and support across the Americas, but also welcomed contestants from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and the US, rekindling a hemispheric drag politics affecting reality TV. Since its first season in 2018, La Más Draga has placed attention on throwing glitter at a masculinist nationalism, priming Mexican cultural iconographies with each competition challenge, which usually tasks participants with dragging up a distinct aspect of popular culture evinced for instance in Mexican revolution icons, Mexican muralist painters, Mexican day of the dead, etc. The series, nonetheless, mediates a contrasting complexity situated within the virtual interstices of media streaming global mogul YouTube. While La Más Draga has fostered a transnational viewership partly because of its online streaming format, the series also presents viewers with alternative modes of consuming and interacting with drag and queer worldmaking through the affective tectonics of jotería. Based on the analysis of various media artifacts, including YouTube videos, Instagram posts, pop songs, and drag material culture, this essay’s fumbling toward a queer hemispheric media infrastructure, referred here to as the jota/x undercommons is threefold. By looking at some of the most iconic episodes from La Más Draga’s five seasons along with participants’ Instagram posts showcasing their drag materials, I first tease out a drag aesthetic located in jotería, that is, a queer concoction of affects linked to Mexicanidad. In this sense, Mexicanidad emerges less as an identity formation linked to Mexican nationalism than as an affective attunement to queer modes of surviving and thriving based on playfulness, care, and pleasure. I then locate this sense of queer Mexicanidad in the pop songs whose rhythms are not only laid out through the lip-sync competitions in the series but are also included in the queer repertoire of drag Latina performers in California.

Dragging jotería is thus a set of queer hemispheric practices linking drag collectives across the US-Mexico border, mediating the contested formations of race, class, citizenship status, nationalism, and belonging. In the last part of this essay, I argue that these hemispheric practices queer up media infrastructures, like YouTube and Instagram, while carving alternative networks for drag media culture away from US-based drag celebrity franchises, namely RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Boulet Brother’s Dragula, but alongside media conglomerates. Following poor drag practices of reuse and recycle, the jota/x undercommons thus conceives a queer affective infrastructure mediating Mexican and Mexican-American forms of drag, while challenging static definitions of drag performance, citizenship and national belonging, and fumbling toward a queer hemispheric undercurrent of transnational coalitional politics and resistance.

Author

• David Tenorio, University of Pittsburgh