Yassified Shakespeare: Gender Performance and Critical ShaxDrag

‘This exhilarating tour of meme, yass, RuPaul and drag embraces Shakespearean postmodernity in all its inauthentic authenticity.’ - Emma Smith, University of Oxford, UK. To ‘yassify’: to ‘glamify’ - often using digital filters - making it Queerer in the processYassification: to make something ‘larger than life’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 today’s audiences.Exploring the intersection between Shakespeare and drag in contemporary American culture, termed here as ‘ShaxDrag’, the book interrogates the specific role Shakespeare plays in American popular culture. Whether it be Queer-coded iterations of Shakespeare’s persona by per