RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 3

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings, Episode 07 – My Best Squirrelfriend’s Dragsmaids Wedding Trip

March 10, 2018 by krisis

Before I dig in to our final power rankings of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3, I want to take a brief step back to discuss the cultural phenomenon that is Drag Race.

Last week RuPaul made some offensive comments about transgender women and their ability to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race in an interview with The Guardian. This isn’t the first time Ru has been dismissive of the feelings and identities of trans queens, although it’s the first time the issue has gained enough traction that he personally apologized (via Twitter).

I am not the right voice to weigh in in the topic of trans competitors on Drag Race. To understand the community’s feelings about this issue, this BuzzFeed article has a good summary, as does this follow-up by The Guardian. The trans voices in those articles lend their own important perspectives, and if you are a fan of this show I think it is worth your time to listen to them.

In listening to transgender and genderqueer people talk about not just RuPaul but Drag Race and drag in general, I understand that some of them feel that the line-blurring and parody aspects of drag can be harmful to them – either directly, or through influencing perception of their identities. Similarly, I know queer people who dislike Drag Race for the way that it depicts (and, to a degree, commodifies) queer culture in a specific, stereotypical, and sanded-down way.

(It is important to understand that a trans person who is dressing to fit their gender identity is not in drag, regardless of their transition status. The assumption that any male-bodied person dressing as a woman is doing drag is a harmful one.)

Alternative gender expression has been important to me my entire life. Some of my earliest memories include dressing up as Wonder Woman and Jem as a little boy and being told that was fine. Maybe that’s why when I discovered the art of drag as a teenager (partially through RuPaul, but also in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Angel in RENT) it resonated with me so strongly. Not, not just strongly. Viscerally.

Drag can be parody, political, and expressive – often all at the same time, and it explores the often arbitrary lines our society has drawn between what it means to be male and female. That’s important to me and to my own conception and expression of gender, but I understand that it’s not for everyone.

In loving Drag Race, I acknowledge all of those problematic aspects of it. Yet, I love drag and for me – someone who doesn’t enjoy going out to bars and clubs – Drag Race is my primary means of accessing and consuming the art of drag. It’s also a highly produced reality TV show, which is not the same as actual reality.

And that’s what I have to say about that.

I turns out that next week will be the final episode of this season of All Stars – which makes this the final All Stars ranking! Which queen has the most momentum towards taking the crown? And, how will a surprising second return from the eliminated queens back as a jury of peers play out for our four finalists?

Don’t worry – All Stars 3 may be over, but my drag coverage will continue! Next week there will be 14 new queens to meet as I rank the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 based on their pre-season coverage. The new season debuts on March 22. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings, Episode 07 – My Best Squirrelfriend’s Dragsmaids Wedding Trip

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings Episode 06 – Handmaids to Kitty Girls

March 3, 2018 by krisis

This week’s RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 was one of the wildest episodes of all time, but most of that is down to what transpired in just the final minutes of the episode.

The Kitty Girls girl group challenge resurrects the dismissed five queens to double the potential for meme-able singing performances and double the elimination drama.

If the ru-turning queens win the challenge, two of them will Lip Sync For Their Lives, with the winner giving any queen the chop. But, if the remaining queens pull out a win, the Lip Sync For Your Legacy winner will get to both bring back a queen and dismiss one.

(I think that’s too much power to arbitrarily hand to a single contestant. Ru is basically absenting herself from giving any kind of guidance to where the competition could go from here. As we’ll see, it backfires even more spectacularly than he could have imagined.)

I’m going to tackle this episode in two parts. First, I’m going to rank the queens of each team purely on their Kitty Girls group performances to see who I would have brought back to the competition and placed in the bottom two. Breaking the performances down queen by queen yields some major surprises – some of which are totally counterintuitive to what I assumed while I was watching.

Then, we’ll get to our typical Power Rankings of our new final five, which is more than a little bit shaken up compared to last week’s rankings thanks to this week’s departure. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings Episode 06 – Handmaids to Kitty Girls

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings Episode 05 – Pop Art Ball

February 24, 2018 by krisis

This week’s “Pop Art Ball” episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 draws its inspiration from Studio 54, and puts the queens through their paces with a dual costume design and graphic design challenge.

The queens have some difficulty with both tasks, leading to a lumpy episode and a curious top two and eliminated queen.

It doesn’t help that Ru wore what might have been her worst wig of all time (not pictured, out of sympathy for Ru and my readers).

Andy Warhol’s famous 1962 soup can painting doesn’t give our queens too much to work with when it comes to designing their own signature soup cans. Warhol’s original run of soup can paintings were a super-literal recreation of the full line of Campbell’s line of soups at the time, with none of the colorful pop art flair for which he is remembered.

Yet, even in that same year he was also producing paintings of deconstructed cans with their labels shredded to reveal the silver beneath. In later revisitations he replaced the red and white with other colors.

As a result, I was expecting the queens to adhere to the spirit of Warhol, if not the letter – to create something on-brand but subversive and pop-art inspired. I was disappointed to see almost all of them miss the mark, with nary a shredded label amongst them.

Meanwhile, Studio 54 is late-stage, decadent disco, but none of the queens nailed the level of care free avant garde of its key players.

That left us with some major shake-ups compared to last week’s rankings! Are you ready to boogie?

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings Episode 04 – All Stars Snatch Game

February 17, 2018 by krisis

This week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 brings what is usually the highlight of the season – Snatch Game! It’s a kitschy, 70s-style game show where queens win not with their answers but with hilarious impressions of famous figures.

Weirdly, this season’s game is the weakest we’ve seen in years. That’s partially down to three queens totally flatlining on the panel, but also down to RuPaul being downright mean to the girls and due to the oddball choice to place actual celebrity Kristin Chenoweth in the Snatch Game with a set of highly-scripted answers that come complete with props.

Maybe having a real life famous person sitting next to the queens would make for a good litmus test of who seems the realest (“real is what you feel, feelings aren’t real…”), but not letting the hilarious Chenoweth think on her feet anchored the Snatch panel with a leaden quality.

The same goes for having judges Michelle Visage and Carson Kressley as the contestants in the game instead of low-grade celebrities or past queens. Delivering Snatch performances directly to the toughest pair of judges takes all of the fun out of the proceedings.

Despite all my complaints, we still wind up with some memorable performances – and a new all-time Snatch Game champion! That doesn’t do much to shake up the top of the ranking compared to last week, but the queens competing for the third spot in the finals get quite a shake-up.

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings S03E03 – The Bitchelor

February 10, 2018 by krisis

This week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars sounded like it might be a trainwreck, but it turned out to be one of the most consistently hilarious episodes of all time.

And also a trainwreck. But, an intentional one!

RuPaul assigns the eight remaining queens characters to improv through an episode of The Bitchelor, a straight-up copy of The Batchelor where all of the women are horrible people.

The queens of most seasons would likely flounder in a totally free-form acting challenge, but The Bitchelor has a secret weapon – the preternaturally handsome Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, from Unreal, who plays a very convincing (not so) straight man to the various hilarity that the queens bring on their dates.

With a “wigs on wigs on wigs” runway that nods to Roxxxy’s Andrews’ iconic “Whip My Hair” wig reveal and an elimination that plays up some of the biggest tension in the cast, this episode was a deliciously nasty surprise from start to finish.

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3 Power Rankings S03E02 – Divas Lip Sync Live

February 3, 2018 by krisis

This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the show sinks to new depths of low-effort self-promotion with a VH1 Divas Live impersonation concert where every one of nine famous divas are singing RuPaul songs.

This was an episode full of buffoonery, riggery, and straight up tomfoolery.

It could have been a truly iconic and hilarious event, as shown by BenDeLaCreme’s instantly-memorable performance lip syncing to RuPauls’ “Mother” as recorded in the style of Julie Andrews by actress/impersonator Christina Bianco.

Why was that performance so incredibly memorable, and all the others much less so? Two reasons.

First, “Mother” was sung in Andrews’ style but over what essentially sounded like original RuPaul backing track. It doesn’t stand up to a direct comparison, but it was a simulacrum of what you’d expect from Ru and nothing like a Julie Andrews song. BenDeLa benefited from the dissonance because she could play up the element of frantic, held-hostage nervousness in her performance. All of the other divas essentially sang an unrecognizable RuPaul song in their own style, which was less funny and gave many of them much less to do.

The second reason connects to that last bit. Essentially, Todrick Hall done fucked up drag race. He went totally ham on the choreography of Ben’s track because there was a lot for her to do. He also went ham on Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey, but barely touched the six other routines. Note his uncontained glee on the judges’ panel as the girls perform his super basic voguing during BenDeLa’s song, while he basically left the capable Thorgy (and, let’s be honest, Trixie) out to dangle.

Where does that leave our rankings? They’re not too shook compared to last week, though one queen is making her own case for an advance on the final three.