Making a spectacle of stigma in RuPaul’s Drag Race

A new article in the Journal of Management Studies describes what can happen when organizations make a spectacle of a stigma—in this case, RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality TV competition among drag queens that premiered in 2009 and was hosted by RuPaul Andre Charles, an American drag queen, actor, supermodel, and songwriter.

In each episode of the show, core stigma is transformed into a form of spectacle and broadcast to a variety of audiences, promoting the drag queen subcultural lingo through social media.

The authors show how organizations can use “spectacularization” to explicitly bring transgressions to the fore and create a new reality around stigma. They also explain how stigma is normalized through certain spectacularization mechanisms.

Another example noted in the article describes how Nike built a marketing campaign on Colin Kaepernick, a US football player who kneeled during the national anthem in support of Black Lives Matter. In this way, Nike reiterated stigma around race and ethnicity while awaking the social consciousness around the Black Lives Matter movement.

"With this research, we want to tell organizations they can have a pivotal role in giving voice to individuals who are traditionally stigmatized and marginalized within society" said the authors of the paper.

URL Upon Publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.12848

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The Journal of Management Studies was established in 1963 to publish original, innovative, and high-quality papers that advance conceptual and empirical knowledge, and address practice in the area of management and organization.

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