The Absurd Moral Panic Over an Iconic “Red Wine Supernova” Drag Performance

x.com/@juliabeatrzzzzz

If you’re on X, you’ve probably seen the viral clip by now: Filipinx drag queen Brigiding, who competed in the inaugural season of Drag Race Philippines, stands on a table in full Chappell Roan drag, lifting up her skirt and letting a stream of red liquid flow through her white tights and into a wine glass as the chorus to “Red Wine Supernova” plays over the sound of a raucous crowd.

The clip, first posted to X by a fan on Sunday, received a barrage of backlash, as many viral drag videos do these days. One widely shared tweet characterized the performance as “men mocking periods,” labeling it misogynist. Another claimed that the performance was a mockery of Chappell herself. You’d expect this sort of sentiment to come from the usual right-wing suspects, but no — much of the scathing criticism came from the kind of X users who have in their bios trans pride symbols, Palestine flags, and the word “feminist” without overt signs of being trans exclusionary. The most viral video of the performance accrued millions of views, and generated thousands of tweets’ worth of exhausting discourse.

Brigiding posted a statement — but thankfully, not an apology — to social media on Thursday, writing, “Chappell’s music speaks to the freedom and creativity that I try my best to bring into my performances as an artist. I intended to celebrate her influence and impact, not to offend anyone, especially women. After all, this is what drag is all about, breaking gender stereotypes and celebration of freedom to artistic self expression.”

First of all, the idea that Chappell Roan would find such a performance offensive is a fundamental misunderstanding of the pop star’s whole shtick. In a September 2023 interview with Broadway World, she decried “those people who don’t get camp,” saying, “You are not even invited to the party.” (And you basically can’t read an interview with her without her saying the word “camp” approximately 500 times.)

More recently, she dressed up as legendary drag queen Divine for Kentuckiana Pride, captioning her Instagram post with the queen’s most famous line: “Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” And lastly, she had local drag performers opening for her on tour during all of her dates this spring. (I might also note that this feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of Filipinx drag. As I have written about previously, drag artists in the Philippines are simply built different.)

It’s also hard to see how the 34-second clip amounts to misogynist mockery. (Again, we are talking about someone appearing to piss red wine into a glass). As many people have pointed out in the online discussion around the video, period stigma is real, and that’s also true in the Philippines, where Catholicism is infused into the country’s social mores thanks to centuries of colonialism. But if anything, you could see Brigiding’s performance as a joyful, camp way of breaking down social taboos around menstruation in the Philippines, and it seems that many of the women in attendance would agree based on their joyous reactions in the clip. Even if it’s not that deep, it’s hard to even understand what makes the performance offensive, unless you’re viewing menstruation as some sort of divine process reserved for “wombyn born wombyn.”

The Midwest Princess will play *SNL* shortly after Billie Eilish’s fourth appearance on the show.

The clip may only be one incident that will fade into the content ether within the next 48 hours, but it is emblematic of an uneasy trend I’ve noticed over the past several years — namely, crypto-TERF sentiments sneaking into queer and trans circles, including the idea that drag is inherently misogynist. It’s also strange and sinister to me that a performance like Brigiding’s would garner ire from young, self-proclaimed progressives at the same time that internet meme culture has looped back around to reinforcing actually regressive ideas about gender with very little pushback.

That isn’t to say that drag can never be misogynist, but characterizing a whole art form as such on the basis that it is a mockery of femininity belies a static, binaristic, and frankly boring view of gender. Drag is both a celebration of femininity and a critique of the ways that it is used as a tool of oppression, heightening and exaggerating traditional gender roles to illustrate how ridiculous they are, or how constructed, or how mutable. As Them’s Samantha Allen said in a conversation we had about gendered memes last year, “Gender has no anchor, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.” Drag, at its best, is the perfect illustration of that tension between the artifice of gender and its very real social meanings. Maybe you won’t see drag like Brigiding’s at your average bachelorette outing, but this is the art form at its finest.

I remember echoes of this kind of regressive anti-drag discourse from the Tumblr days, when supposedly “trans-inclusive radical feminists” convinced a whole microgeneration of online queers that there is a brand of suffering that is specific and core to womanhood, one that is inescapable no matter what. It scares me a little that not only is this kind of essentialist thinking still around, but it has proliferated beyond the confines of a few thousand Tumblr blogs and now manifests as “female rage” edits on TikTok, and tweets like those complaining about Brigiding’s performance.

This is my plea to my fellow Gen Z theyfabs: at a time when drag is being criminalized around the world and drag queens are being painted as womanhood-appropriating predators, we need to make sure that we’re not reinforcing rhetoric that is way more conservative (or transmisogynist) than we intend for it to be. Beyond that, it is way more fun when you treat gender as a long-running bit that you commit to; I promise that’s what Chappell would want.

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Originally Appeared on them.