In that season, all the contestants were told to be newscasters for a challenge, and Manila Luzon did this incredibly racist performance where she spoke with a really thick stereotypically Asian accent and suggested that the guest star for that show should marry her brother because her brother needed a green card. Now the whole purpose of RuPaul’s Drag Race, of course, is present yourself as more feminized it’s a little difficult to say, “Well, the Asian contestants are being more feminized than others.” But until this season, the Asian characters were heavily racialized in ways that the other contestants weren’t, and more importantly, the show rewarded the Asian contestants the more they Orientalized themselves, particularly with Manila Luzon. Particularly it was problematic in the sense that Asian men in general are presented in the gay community as being more feminine in order to present white men as being more normative and acceptable to the mainstream audience. Winter Han: My previous thoughts on the show were actually pretty critical of the way it presented the Asian contestants. Spencer Kornhaber: What did you make of Kim Chi?Ĭ. This interview has been edited and condensed. While Han hadn’t watched Season 8 in its entirety, he had kept up on Kim Chi. His book Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America features a chapter about Asian American drag queens, including past RuPaul contestants Manila Luzon and Jujubee. Winter Han, an associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. Interested in the wider context of Kim Chi’s performance, I spoke with C. Moments like these contributed to the sense that Kim Chi was doing something novel on Drag Race, even though the show has long been concerned with self-love, non-conformity, and playing with stereotypes. And when asked about which of the chiseled male models in the show’s “Pit Crew” she’d like to lose her virginity to, she deadpanned, “I’m not trying to catch anything, so I’m going to say none of them,” sending the theater into shocked laughter. Breaking with a typical narrative of the show-“ Drag Race: bringing families together,” RuPaul likes to say-Kim Chi revealed she still hadn’t told her mom she does drag and doesn’t plan on doing so. In the finale, Kim Chi’s original song, “Fat, Femme, and Asian,” performed partially in Korean, took direct aim at three labels frequently treated as undesirable in the gay male mainstream.
A 28-year-old Chicagoan and first-generation Korean American, Kim Chi’s fantastical outfits had frequently impressed the judges even while her physical clumsiness had become a running joke. But the most memorable moments of the night belonged to a runner-up, Kim Chi, as had many of the most memorable moments of the season.
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