Yassified Shakespeare : Gender Performance and Critical ShaxDrag

This book explores the under-theorized intersections between Shakespeare and drag in contemporary American culture and performances of and around what it terms “ShaxDrag.”

From the root word “yass” comes the verb “to yassify”. On social media, to “yassify” something is to “glamify” it — generally by running it through multiple digital filters and making it queerer in the process. Yassification distorts reality, and its satire lies in its self-referential nature: there needs to be an original object for comparison to the yassified version. Enter: William Shakespeare.

From Harold Perrineau’s turn as Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet to the “ShakesQueer” episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Shakespeare’s cultural capital is often served hand-in-hand with drag aesthetics to contemporary audiences. Using a range of examples including & Juliet, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Something Rotten! and Fat Ham, this book interrogates the specific role Shakespeare plays in American popular culture for contemporary queer audiences. “ShaxDrag” can be an act of performance layered on top of drag, but additionally this book argues that adopting the persona of Shakespeare in the creative context of playful anachronisms, as in queer-coded iterations on Broadway or at Renaissance fairs, is in itself an act of drag.

Shakespeare has long symbolized deep connection to white, eurocentric ideas about high culture, education, language, and taste. In digital spaces, Shakespeare can be fragmented, broken apart, manipulated, and re-arranged. In essence: Shakespeare is an identity that one might don and doff at will. This book argues that ShaxDrag is a means through which marginalized voices can liberate Shakespeare’s cultural capital from its colonialist agenda, re-read it via various contemporary filters, and use it to advocate for their own inclusion in greater canons. It uses the concept to mine Shakespearean remixes as a site of queer theory and to reveal how Shakespeare can be a critical site of queer world-making.