This analysis aims to highlight the linguistic movement of drag terminology into popular culture using public twitter data. The proliferation of words that have their histories in drag, not only signals the rising impact of the LGBTQ+ community in society, but it also contributes to the larger evolutionary question of how language is cross- culturally shared throughout communitites, and what is changed throughout this process.

QUESTIONS

How has the drag community/culture influenced the greater scope of Twitter?

How has user content production contributed to the cultural phenomenologies of hyper-interactions (‘stanning’) that dually promote and defame (‘drag’/‘subtweet’) cultural figures, movements, and media?

How does the proliferation of drag culture on twitter further contribute to the polarization of online discussions?

DESCRIPTION

With social media and the internet playing a pivotal role for the exploration of identities and sharing of experiences, especially for the queer and LGBT+ community, the internet realm evolves into a space where people can learn about and support one another. “The internet affords connections to similar others, and provides queer young people with access to interpersonal networks of support and sociability in safe and anonymous online spaces” (Hanckel and Morris, 2014). Hence, an emphasis is to explore this virtual reality through Twitter, one of the main outlets that people can engage with one another.Twitter was established almost 13 years ago as a social networking platform centered around tweets, currently restricted to 280 characters in English, that other users online could favorite, retweet and respond. Over the years, Twitter has served as a platform of expression for various communities, but we saw ubiquitous content being produced through what we identify as ‘stan’ Twitter. Stan is derived from two words: stalker and fan; these stan communities are defined by their respective public figures, television shows, musicians and more. Though the idols of worship for each community is different, we were able to identify the almost standardized terminology that these different communities on Twitter have utilized to produce their respective content.

As a group, our focus was driven by our exposure to drag culture and its impact outside the scope of drag itself. “Drag developed out of the use of flamboyant dressing as a masquerade or disguise that allowed the drag queens to flaunt femininity and embrace gender fluidity by performing a separate identity that they could put on and take off” (Taylor and Rupp, 2004). Drag is a performance art which primarily focuses on men cross-dressing, wearing women’s clothes and makeup, and has fostered a cultural movement rooted in Ball culture; these underground Balls were dominated by black transexual women and homosexuals. Much of Ball culture manifested itself within Drag and with the growing popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race; exposure to this culture and community is reflected by the terminology and content being produced on Twitter. Its increasing prevalence over the past 5 years has motivated us to research this phenomenon.

SIGNIFICANCE

The content produced by stan Twitter is circulated and thereby serves as essential tools in publicizing and marketing any type of figure or media produced for consumption. The increasing presence and influence of both the gay community and its subsidiary drag community are reflected through the circulation of given terms in the past few years. This linguistic movement of drag terminology into pop-culture not only signals the rising impact of the LGBT community in society, but it also contributes the larger evolutionary question of how language is shared cross-culturally and what is taken and lost in the process. “When we consider the 'great drag queen hype' as one of the forces of globalisation, the differentiated view shows that it has not directly shaped an international drag queen identity or performativity. Rather, in changing the perception of the mainstream, it has provided a younger generation with new possibilities and opportunities to establish themselves in the niches of the majority society” (Balzer, 2005).When vernacular is utilized by groups that do not originate from the same community, the defining features of a term are susceptible to shift. Usually, these are gradual processes, but the use of social media allows the linguistic exchange to occur much more easily. In this study, we will be analyzing not only this linguistic exchange but also linguistic change.

In our pursuit to discover these insights, we want to investigate who is using these terms and for what they are using them. “The Internet has led to a variety of virtual worlds. My informants have been inspired and empowered by their virtual reality, relative safety and increased accessibility to perform their sissy selves, which, though at different levels, might need to be suppressed in their real lives” (Lin, 2006). With the rising popularity of drag cultural vernacular on Twitter, discerning between which other communities are engaging in drag culture is obscured; popularization of terms and concepts could travel through starkly different channels and thereby, perspectives. Although, we do take advantage of the opportunity to see how these historically and traditionally drag terms are being applied outside of their original uses. Through this research, our group aims to: understand the origins of these terms, who originally used them and how did these communities use them, and what is the fine line between appreciation and appropriation of drag culture on Twitter.

AUDIENCE

Throughout our research, we have seen tweets coming from countless numbers of different communities: political, musical, pop-culture related and even sports communities (see below for examples). As these specific terms and slang proliferate through pop-culture, it is important to be aware of the rich histories and cultures these words originated from. This project is motivated towards educating the millions of users who use Twitter each and every day, to gain a better understanding of where the words they are using so frequently are actually coming from. This research could also be presented to members of specified Drag and LGBTQ+ communities, in order to confirm the term histories and understand their opinions. It is crucial to ensure these members do not feel as though their culture is being inappropriately appropriated as different communities have grown to endorse these terms. Several questions our project could answer are as follows: Is Drag culture is being appreciated or appropriated? If they feel that it is being appropriated, how can we, as a society and members participating in this pop-culture, find a solution and educate people so that this is remediated? In which contexts do we find the other communities utilizing these terms? Are they contextually positive or negative?

EXAMPLES OF PROLIFERATION

"There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger and thats the tea sis"

“I saw Avengers Endgame on April 24th (the day it came out in France) and it was AMAZING! Like seriously @Russo_Brothers you guys could NOT have made a better film, my wig is SNATCHED and my mind BLOWN! Also great performance from ALL the actors! @Marvel #AvengersEngame”

"Sansa, throwing shade at Khaleesi:

What do dragons eat anyway?

Khaleesi, breaker of of chains, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Sipper of Tea, and Blocker of Shade:

Whatever they want.

ADVANTAGE Khaleesi #Game of Thrones"

"Why does this president even try anymore like he’s rlly getting his wig snatched left and right goddamn"

DATA

SELECTION

We chose six initial terms to analyze their linguistic movement online. These terms have been popularized in pop-culture by the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, and we chose them by their prominence in everyday dialogue and usage on social media.

TEA

WIG

(N):

"A back-formation from the letter T for “truth”; refers to gossip, news, information, or true facts” (The Queendom 2019).

EX: What’s the tea? Or The girls spilled tea as they talked about what happened at the party the night before.

(N/V): to literally talk about the wigs that Drag Queens use for their outfits. The act of taking or “snatching” a Drag Queen’s wig is considered to be highly offensive thus, leaving the Drag Queen shocked. However, as the term evolved, it encompasses how people are positively shocked.

To get an accurate sample, certain terms were run through the TAGS module. After analyzing which terms provided the best results for proper usage of the terminology we settled on four unique data points: “Wig & Snatched,” “Shade,” “Tea & Sis,” and “Snapped”. We realized that searching for “Wig” and “Snatched” or “Tea” and “Sis” individually did not give us the contextually relevant tweets we were searching for so we had to group them together for our data to align. We made sure to choose two concepts that have positive connotations and two others that have negative connotations in order to have diversity. The data covers tweets sent within a seven-day timeframe, prior to us pulling the data, but for certain data sets, such as “Shade,” we could only pull tweets a day at a time. We thereby limited this date range to Thursday & Friday, which are the days RuPaul’s Drag Race airs, and the day following it. We decided that by looking at these dates we can gain insight on how these terms are generally being utilized in the Twitterverse as the show itself provides the #DragRace in order to open discussion on Twitter.

SIS

SNATCHED

(N):

a genderless term to refer to a person; Slang for sisters

EX: Omg yes sis, slay!

(V):

To be on fleek or look on point; To be slayed by another's look or actions that you lose your weave.

EX: Beyonce stays out here snatching girls edges with her Coachella performance.

SHADE

SNAPPED

(V):

For someone to have reached a level of untouchability that is virtually unachievable by any other party, doing so effortlessly. As easy as the ‘snap’ of the fingers.

EX. Sister snapped when she walked out the house this morning because the edges: layed, makeup: beat and waist: snatched.

(N):

"Throwing Shade

(V):

Subtly pointing out a person’s flaws or faults. Being shady" (The Queendom 2019)"

EX: No shade, but you look a mess. That’s not an insult, it’s a fact.

FINDINGS: TEA/SIS

Twitter is used around the world. Therefore, tweets, hashtags, and certain terminology also propagate around the world as well. Drag culture on twitter is no different and has disseminated into countless other communities across the globe. This map displays 619 tweets containing both of the terms ‘tea’ and ‘sis.’ The data spreads across the world, with one data point, or tweet, in almost every continent. It is evident even through these relatively few data points that drag terms, and therefore drag culture, are spreading outside their mainstream American LGBTQ+ space and into so many other communities throughout the entire world.

Not only were user locations spread around the world, but there was a trend for users to change their location to their pronouns instead of their actual locations. User's are able to conceal their real-life location by using their identifying pronouns. We did not research this in depth, but we think this is an interesting aspect that should be noted especially in conjunction with the history and community these terms are originating from.

WORK PLAN

METHODS

We used the TAGS module to scrape the data for our terms. TAGS is a google sheet application that links to our developer twitter account and is able to scrape data up to seven days in the past. Each term scraped produced a minimum of 1000+ tweets and a maximum of 3000 tweets. If this minimum was not met, we changed our terms to one that would produce more results or more relevant data. Additionally, to ensure all tweets using these terms are pulled, we didn’t place a limit on the follower count. Once the data was successfully scraped met our base requirements we duplicated the archives sheets and repeated the process if necessary. Through this method, we narrowed down our final terms for data cleaning and analysis. Each member of the team was assigned a term to scrape, clean, and analyze.

CONCLUSION

Throughout our research, our group was dedicated to investigating how online interactions promoted and defamed Drag culture by using Twitter as a platform to analyze communication methods. Yet, we are extremely interested to look into how the drag community has come into contact and ultimately changed the type of interactions that other groups and communities have with one another. The Drag community’s linguistic impact on social media is evident in the varied spheres of usage the terms above have entered. Their terms are used to show devotion, excitement, or even political and religious affirmation. While most of the sentiments are positive, groups also use these terms to defend their fandoms or faves, which accounts for the negative sentiments present. For example, “throwing shade” and being “shady” are socially acceptable interactions, and people delight watching it occur. However, similarly, for those who “stan” the person or show, if it is being “shaded” they will not be hesitant to “snap” at those criticizing their beloved figures. Much of our data contains examples of these acts of devotion to music artist such as Ariana Grande and the Korean boy group BTS. If they release new music, appear on the red carpet, or perform on stage the terms “wig” & “snatched” or “snapped” as are used as signs of endearment and approval from fans. Since both of these artists are currently on tour many tweets will show clips of them performing, and their fans will utilize these terms to exaggerate their excitement. Due to Drag’s relevance in pop-culture today it is understandable that these terms have become another medium to express ideology and opinions.

However, more unexpected usage of the terms have also occurred when discussing genres such as sports and politics. Two of the top results associated with our “shade” dataset were the sport anchors Stephen Smith and Will Cain, and discussion about the NFL draft. While this most likely influenced by the days chosen for the data set, it shows the extent that these terms have been adopted into pop culture. It is not unexpected that these terms would be used to discuss music, because drag incorporates many performative and musical elements. However, the use of this language to refer to athletes and political figure demonstrates how prominent stanning culture is on twitter. The success of this linguistic exchange all comes down to the fact that Drag is becoming globalized by media and viral culture (Balzar, 2005). While this raises questions over the commoditization of Drag culture, the internet has become an essential platform for movements in the Drag community. Similar to “the [essential] connection between trans activism and the Internet” social movements or issues faced by the Drag and LGBTQ community becomes integrated into the internet (Erlick, 2018). Twitter has provided this space for cultural exchange and interaction leading people to be more aware of issues affecting these communities. Inversely, the popularization of Drag culture has impacted stanning culture on twitter and this phenomenon of hyper-interactions. Drag is an exaggerated artform, and it is only right the the language and affect its produces in pop-culture be just as outlandish and emphasized. Perhaps that is part of the appeal, Drag lingo allows people to express their heightened emotions in terms where hyper-performativity is encouraged.