RuPaul's Drag Race UK's third season is about to land.
The show will see twelve queens battle it out to become the UK’s next drag superstar as they get knocked out week by week in a series of varied challenges.
However, one queen is already making Drag Race history.
Victoria Scone, 27, is a Welsh queen who takes inspiration from pantomime and British drag icons such as Ceri Dupree and Danny La Rue.
Scone, whose real name is Emily Diapre, is also Drag Race’s first cis-woman contestant.
The choice to cast a cisgender woman in Drag Race has been somewhat of a controversy.
For a long time, drag has been reserved for men, usually gay, and the idea that a cis woman could be brought into this space has hit nerves among some viewers.
This, in my opinion, is a very old-fashioned perspective on drag.
Drag Race as a franchise has received backlash for its lack of representation of people who fall outside the cisgender male label.
In a Guardian interview in 2018, RuPaul infamously discussed the ‘dichotomy’ between the trans liberation movement and the art of drag, and said that drag lost its 'danger' once it was a woman recreating the same hyper-femininity that male contestants do.
The show has also been criticised for its emphasis on looking ‘fish’ (ie, when a queen resembled conceived notions of femininity in drag to the point that she isn’t obviously a drag queen), and for not featuring drag kings as well as queens.
Both cis and trans women, as well as non-binary people, have historically been excluded from competing on the show, despite their prevalence in non-televised drag.
However in recent years we’ve mercifully seen Drag Race grow more inclusive.
The show has featured high-profile non-binary contestants such as Bimini Bon Boulash, trans men such as Season 13 finalist Gottmik, and has now seen Kylie Sonique Love, who competed on Season 2 of the American show ten years ago before coming out as a trans woman, reach the final of All Stars 6.
These changes recognise that drag, at its core, is gender parody, irrespective of which gender is being parodied, or who is doing the parodying.
But drag is also a protest, a way to reclaim and redefine what it means to be feminine - or indeed masculine or androgynous.
As a self-professed ‘celesbian’ (celebrity lesbian), Stone is the perfect candidate to reclaim her own femininity.
Lesbian women are often relegated to two camps: femme or butch, and where they fall in this binary often determines how they are stereotyped.
Scone, in choosing to parody femininity, gets to reclaim the way that the world sees lesbian women and has total control over the way she is perceived.
As drag’s major bastion to the rest of the world and a symbol of LGBTQ+ success, RuPaul’s Drag Race has a duty to be at the forefront of the gender liberation movement, and featuring a cisgender lesbian on the show is part and parcel of that process.
And as RuPaul so often says, “we’re all born naked and the rest is drag” - so go on Victoria, do it for the gals.
