Date of Award

Fall 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2025 Finn Verdonk. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics Department

First Advisor

Kirby Conrod

Abstract

When English speakers talk about drag performers, what factors impact the pronoun that is used? Pulling data from two seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Season 4 and Season 14) and one season of Dragula (Season 5), this thesis attempts to understand the ways in which drag performers use pronouns in discourse about fellow drag performers. Building from Myers’s 2018 proposal that using he/him pronouns for drag queens can index shadiness or criticism, I expand her sample to see if her findings hold up over time and across franchises. I find that he/him pronouns on RPDR no longer index shadiness and that they instead might index an atypical positionality to the drag queen stereotype. On Dragula, I find that the increased frequency of they/them pronouns may correlate with the increased diversity of contestants on the show, and may also indicate that the referent is distanced in some way from the prototypical drag queen image that is portrayed on these shows.

Keywords

Sociolinguistics, Gender, Indexicality, Drag, Pronouns, Reality Television

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