Employing Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen et al. in Theorizing about intercultural communication. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2005) as my theoretical framework, I examine communicative practices and beliefs as to what it means to speak like a drag queen as
This piece of research may be interesting to some. In this essay Nathaniel Simmons examines (and tries to make sense of) the speech patterns of the contestants of season four of Drag Race. Simmons first examines the speech used by the queens to identify themselves as a group, then he contextualizes Drag Race itself. Finally he discusses how Speech Codes Theory serves as an appropriate theoretical lens for the study. To collect his data Simmons “viewed each episode and transcribed moments in which contestants seemed to indicate culturally specific ways of speaking”. He then pulled out a few choice phrases (”fishy”, hungry” “family” etc) and takes a closer look at them. This data is pretty accurate, if a bit lacking. What the author did go over, he covered thoroughly and very accurately. I can be sure of that because the way he broke down the meaning of the words/phrases is in line with how my friends and I use them with each other when we are talking this way. However, I feel that by not including “Untucked” (the “behind the scenes” after show) he missed a lot of the meaningful interactions between the queens where the conversations are more open.
