Is She a Feminosa? A Ru Girl? If Not, What Is She?

I heard that question in a video, and I haven’t been able to put it down.

“We changed our names like they did, and we dressed up in outrageously crazy outfits in order to be a satire of them—only we ended up becoming what we were satirizing.” — Michael Alig, on the Club Kids, Interview

Some context, if you need it: “Feminosa” is what queens are called and call themselves when they come up through La Más Draga. “Ru girl” is the obvious one: the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise.

And the question that follows is the one that bothers me. If not, what is she? because if a queen belongs to neither, we suddenly don’t know what to call them. We have to describe them. We have to actually watch them act and understand what they are trying to say, directly or indirectly.

The mold

The queens from each show fit the same mold; they have a defined vocabulary, they build the same kind of look (some better than others for sure, and sometimes it depends on how much money they have), and they tell a similar kind of story.

Watch a workroom entrance and count the steps: the entrance quote, the reaction shot, the reveal of the trauma somewhere around the halfway mark of the season, and the moment of vulnerability that lands right at the perfect time for the crown (Nymphia came to mind for some reason). It’s not that any of it is fake. It’s that it is shaped, and it makes one hungry for the tiniest of twists or differences.

Adorno had a phrase for this: standardization and pseudo-individualization. The product is pre-structured, and the individuality of each unit is a variation manufactured inside the standard, precisely so the consumer feels they are choosing. Every queen is unique. All of them are unique in the same eleven ways.

I mean, it is not a coincidence that we start mixing queens up. (cof cof RuPaul cof)

Why the mold forms

The easy explanation is copying: new queens imitate the ones on TV. That’s real, and there’s research behind it; Carl Schottmiller’s UCLA dissertation on Drag Race found exactly this, that the show’s gravitational pull tends toward homogenization, with newer performers modeling themselves on contestants.

But copying is the symptom, not the mechanism. Freud gives us the better answer in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego: a group coheres when its members put the same object in the place of their ego ideal, and as a consequence, they identify with one another. The resemblance is not the goal. The resemblance is the byproduct of everyone facing the same (sometimes forced) ideal.

Nobody is copying anybody. They are all looking at Ru. They are all looking at the panel. And when a hundred people look in the same direction, from behind they start to look like the same person.

Which also explains why the Feminosa/Ru girl distinction gets policed so hard. Freud saw that too: the narcissism of minor differences. The rivalry is fiercest between the groups that most resemble each other, because the difference is thin and has to be defended. Tell that to the producers of La Mas DragAAAA (if you didn’t get that light shade, there is video of the producers yelling at the contestants for not using the franchise lingo)

The category makes the kind

Ian Hacking called it dynamic nominalism. New categories don’t just describe people who were already there. They bring new kinds of people into existence, and those people then act back on the category, which changes, which produces new people, and so on. He called it the looping effect.

“Ru girl” was not a way of being a drag queen in 2008. There was nothing to “be.” It is a way of being one now, and aspiring queens shape themselves toward it, and in shaping themselves toward it they redefine what the next generation will find waiting for them.

The label doesn’t fit the queen. The label makes the queen.

RuPaul is in the box he built

There is a moment RuPaul has described more than once. In 1993 he performed at the March on Washington, and something changed. The club years had been fun; he has said as much: the terrorizing of neighborhoods, the naughty things, and the general refusal to behave. But standing in front of that crowd, he understood the fun was over because now he had to represent. He had become the voice for people who had never had one.

Nobody imposed the box on him. He walked into it for excellent reasons; he was a Black drag queen in 1993 being handed a microphone, and he used it. That is not a betrayal. That is what winning costs.

The moment you speak for a group, you have a responsibility to the people you are speaking to, and that responsability means shape. The man who once described his drag as an extension of punk rock, a reaction to the Reagan era, and social satire now presides over a format with sponsors, standards, and a very specific idea of what a queen is.

He built the box out of the only material available: the demand that he understood. And now he lives in it too.

This is what people get wrong when they come for Ru. It isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the looping effect catching its own author, and you can tell in interviews he feels caged, and that explains the fun TikToks we are now getting; they feel like an escape for him, and I love watching him have fun with drag again.

“But this isn’t new”

Fair. Esther Newton’s Mother Camp showed, in 1972, that drag was already divided: street impersonators vs. stage impersonators, a whole internal hierarchy with its own snobberies. The box predates the television by decades.

Two things changed: queens used to be local and unnamed. A queen in one city could ignore what a queen in another city thought a queen was; the loop ran slowly, through a scene, through gossip, through a room. Now the loop runs through a franchise at the speed of a streaming release (how many seasons are we getting a year now?), and it is broadcast and monetized. There is an audition at one end and a prize at the other. The cycle is faster than ever.

The other mold

I’ve spent most of this on Ru, which is unfair, because the more interesting box is the other one.

La Más Draga did not import the American mold. It built its own out of folklore, cabaret, cine de oro, and Mexicanidad, and that’s genuinely something; it decentered a drag that had been speaking English by default. Alonso Sandoval Ávila’s thesis at El Colef reads the Mexican drag boom exactly this way: reality television mass-producing drag celebrities and doing it in a local key.

But a mold made of cultural pride is a tighter mold, not a looser one. To be a Feminosa is to be defined as authentically Mexican in a specific, curated way. And that is much harder to refuse than Ru’s version, because refusing it doesn’t just make you a bad contestant. It makes you look like you’re rejecting where you come from, and that is something that Mexicans take very seriously.

The kindest cage is the hardest one to leave.

What doesn’t fit

So where does that leave us?

I want to say that drag has roots and the roots will save it, that the real thing is down there waiting, and that if the shows get too polished, we can always go back. But my own argument won’t let me. RuPaul was the roots. The un-PC club queen making fun of Nancy Reagan is not a reservoir we can draw from; he’s the man who became the franchise. Roots don’t protect you. They get institutionalized.

What survives is something smaller and more reliable: the remainder. No category ever finishes the job. Something always fails to fit the queen, who is too weird, too slow, too ugly, too political, too local, too much. She doesn’t get cast. She doesn’t get a suffix. And that failure is not a tragedy; it’s a supply line, because that is where the next category gets made. Alig’s Club Kids became what they were satirizing, and then somebody new had to show up to satirize them.

Which is why the answer isn’t nostalgia. It’s an address. The remainder is in the local scene: the bar with bad lighting, the show that starts an hour late, and the queen with forty followers who is doing something nobody has a word for yet. Go look. We will pull it into the light eventually, because we always do; the loop needs new material, and we are the ones who ask for it.

So, what is she?

If she isn’t a Feminosa and she isn’t a Ru girl, then what is she?

They are a drag performer.

It is not their problem that the response seems lacking and that we now require a franchise suffix before we can understand them.

That’s the diagnosis.