“Be Proud, and Loud”: Linguistic Markers of Pride in Drag Queens’ Spoken Discourse

Abstract

Many studies have shown how drag queens blur the boundaries between genders and identities through their performances and their language, thereby disturbing the political status quo on binary gender. In this study, we intend to show that their relationship with the emotion of pride, and the expression of this emotion can also participate in the political affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities. Basing our understanding of “pride” on the ternary distinction between arrogance, superiority, and dignity pride, we carried out an analysis of four linguistic markers of pride in a corpus taken from the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race: the violent lexicon, the reappropriation of insults, the self-referential use of the third person, and deictics. Firstly, this analysis revealed that while no marker was exclusively linked to a particular type of pride, they appear in specific scenarios of pride. Secondly, we show how they often reveal and reject the stigmas LGBTQ+ people have faced in history. Finally, we highlight how the context of the reality TV show tends to deprive the expression of pride of the political dimension it can have in the drag community.

Keywords

• corpus analysis
• pride
• linguistic markers of emotion
• drag queens
• spoken discourse