“Drag as marketplace”: interview with Maria Rita Micheli
03/17/2025
5 min
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With the success of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, amongst others, drag has reached new audiences and developed into a booming market worth millions of dollars. “Yet, studies examining its market value as a product, brand or consumption practice remain scarce” note the editors of a new book “Drag as marketplace – Contemporary Cultures, Identities and Business” (Bristol University Press). An interdisciplinary collection of contributions from different international experts, this publication looks to “fill that void, exploring the intersection of drag and markets”. We spoke to one of the *editors, Maria Rita MICHELI, professor at IÉSEG, about the book, key takeaways for marketers, and links to her research.
What motivated you and your co-authors to edit a book on this topic?
Maria Rita MICHELI: All of us have been working on the themes of diversity and inclusion for a while and we have been focusing on the co-existence of stigma and the “mainstreamization” of drag as a cultural and market product. The motivation to edit the book was two-fold. On the one hand, we wanted to focus on this process of mainstreamization, exploring how market success can co-exist with tensions around the possible lack of authenticity when a cultural product becomes mainstream. On the other hand, we thought that a book would have been a powerful tool to make our message more mainstream, going beyond academic papers and reaching a wider public.
What are some of the key takeaways from the book?
Maria Rita MICHELI: Drag shows on mainstream TV have empowered drag queens, who are now often treated as superstars, sponsoring famous brands and having their own product lines. However, we see that some drag communities are still marginalized in a variety of (market and non-market) contexts. This reminds us that there is still the need to fight stigmatization.
Another takeaway concerns the distinction between stigma and legitimacy. The chapters of the book highlight that, while drag queens are stigmatized, they do not aim to eliminate stigma as this makes them who they are. The just want stigma to be “normalized”. However, all of them search for some form of legitimation. Stigma then becomes something that does not need to be eliminated, but something that can lead drag queens to be legitimized.
The tensions created by the success of shows like RuPaul Drag Race (a TV show featuring competitions amongst drag queens that has now reached its 17th season) also emerge in the book. These types of shows enable mainstream markets to be more inclusive, by giving visibility to drag as a cultural and market product. At the same time, drag is also ‘commodified’, turning a subculture into form of commercialized product that may face a potential loss of authenticity.
Artisanship is another crucial theme in the book. Drag is considered as a form of creative labor and as a constant development of a cultural brand, employing codes, knowledge, and tools all contributing to the craft of drag. It is emphasized as an artisanal practice with a unique market position, while at the same time it showcases symbols, rituals, and languages adopted and largely reproduced by brands and consumers.
Based on these trends, we have developed a framework of legitimation of drag marketplace culture, based on artisanship, stigma and commodification.
Through the different chapters, we suggest that the drag marketplace is built at the intersection of three types of legitimacy – subcultural (it refers to the perceived authenticity, validity, and acceptance of drag as a subculture in society, and of its practices, consumers, brands and other market actors within the subculture), marketized (deriving from the ability to satisfy the demands of the market and its participants), and exploitative (reached through ‘flattening’ the experience of the stigma of marginalized drag identities with, for instance, commodification). These three types of legitimacy are pushed and sustained by artisanship, stigma, and commodification, which co-exist and build on the competing forces highlighted above.
How does this tie in with your research on this topic?
Maria Rita MICHELI: The conversations emerging from the book are strongly linked to a number of my research topics. For instance, in 2022, I coauthored a research article on the possibility of making organizational stigma more spectacular or sensational instead of concealing it. We explored this theme in the context of RuPaul Drag Race show.
With my coauthors, we confirm the importance of leveraging stigma for success in the book chapters, and the different contexts explored allow us to expand the conversation we initiated in the paper. In addition, the evolution of drag as a market product is also very much related to my research on how the position of organizations towards stigmatized consumers evolve over time.
In a paper from 2024 we showed that companies serving LGBTQIA+ consumers have moved across the three specific phases: crisis, marketization, and advocacy. In the book, we observe the growth of drag as a stigmatized market category, and we find many similarities between the two. In particular, tensions persist for both stigmatized market categories and consumers, despite the normalization they experienced over time.
Are there any key issues that marketers should focus on when trying to reach LGBTQIA+ consumers?
Maria Rita MICHELI: There are some core insights that can be extracted from the book to inspire marketers when addressing LGBTQIA+ consumers. In my research, I had already observed that stigma still exists for different groups and individuals in the LGBTQIA+ community. In the book, we confirm these results, and we distinguish among different types of legitimacy that can play a role for stigmatized consumers and market products. We claim that legitimacy can be enhanced even when stigma persists.
In this respect, it is really important for companies to engage in advocacy actions and collaborate with policy makers, as this will help increase legitimation and avoid marginalization of stigmatized consumers and market products. For example, in response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill (forbidding education on sexual identity and gender orientation in schools), Lush launched the Gay is OK campaign, promoting a soap bar with the message Gay is OK written on it. The proceeds of the sales were donated to the civil rights organization Equality Florida, fighting discrimination of LGBTQIA+ individuals.
Another insight for marketers is that they should pay attention to the tensions existing between commodification and the potential lack of authenticity. While it may be a marketers’ role to bring visibility and success to stigmatized products in the mainstream markets, they also need to protect the authenticity of the market categories. This allows companies to be associated with values such as respect, loyalty, and authenticity, which also have positive impact on performance and brand image.
Finally, marketers can think about how to engage LGBTQIA+ consumers and make them active contributors of the marketing strategy. The book confirms the increasing passion of consumers for drag, leading them to buy products sponsored by drag queens, ranging from cosmetics to clothes and alcoholic beverages. In addition, consumers contribute to the success of drag cultural products by producing content themselves and boosting their impact. As such, marketers should be aware of the willingness of consumers to be actively engaged, working with them when developing marketing campaigns, launching new products, or promoting initiatives. While this is true for several products, it becomes even more important for a cultural product like drag, which entails high emotional involvement.
*Drag as marketplace – Contemporary Cultures, Identities and Business (Bristol University Press), edited by Mikko Laamanen, Mario Campana, Maria Rita Micheli, Rohan Venkatraman and Katherine Duffy.
