Body Talk and the Remediation of Women's Voices in RuPaul's Drag Race

This article examines the centrality of cis women's voices to RuPaul's Drag Race (Logo TV, 2009–2016; VH1, 2017–), arguing that the show's reliance on lip-synch and vocal impersonation reworks historical discourse around queer and cis women's voices as both symbolically powerful and policed. By presenting RuPaul's voice as a queered variation on the maternal voice, and by suggesting a voice-based symbiosis between the drag queen and the cis female diva, the show is found to question essentialist links between voice, gender, and body and to use expressive movement to make a visual spectacle of the reembodied voice and its vocal grain.