9 - Conclusion: Studying Drag Marketplace Cultures – Critical Reflections and Future Directions

Summary

In their seminal piece in the Journal of Consumer Research, Arnould and Thompson (2005) discuss marketplace cultures as a key research programme within marketing and consumer research. Marketplace cultures look at the ‘ways in which consumers forge feelings of social solidarity and create distinctive, fragmentary, self-selected, and sometimes transient cultural worlds through the pursuit of common consumption interests’ (p 873). Inspired by the tradition of sociological and cultural work on the power and marketplaces, from McCracken (1986) to modern work in the consumer culture theory canon, the chapters in this collection have explored how consumers, marketplaces and drag artists have forged a cultural world based on deviance, solidarity, commodification and dissent. The chapters that make up this collection, and the authors who have contributed to them, explore these intersections in ways that coalesce (and are thus organized) around three main substantive areas that inform contemporary drag marketplace cultures: politicizing drag identities, marketizing drag and digitizing drag.

In this concluding chapter to the book, our primary goal is to offer directions for future research into drag marketplace cultures, and we do so by taking a macro-level critical reading of the conversations that the various chapters have with each other. As we assembled this book, it became clear that the authors of each chapter not only spoke to one or more of the key substantive areas just mentioned, but also to one or more of three larger, more abstract themes embedded into contemporary drag marketplace cultures (henceforth marketplace themes) – artisanship (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 7 and 8), stigma (Chapters 2, 3 and 5) and commodification (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 7). In turn, the themes of artisanship, stigma and commodification were further used to problematize a key issue that is germane to the question of why drag is an interesting marketplace culture – the issue of legitimacy. Drag has historically been a subcultural enterprise, a creative expression of queerness that seeks to defy normativity (see, for example, McCormack and Wignall, 2022), but, in its myriad interactions with the contemporary (often mainstream) marketplace, as explored in the chapters that comprise this book, we see a constant problematizing of the nature of drag, of drag artists and of the dominating nature of marketplace cultures.

In the sections that follow, we first explore the three emergent theoretical narratives of artisanship, stigma and commodification, highlighting theoretical confluences between the arguments and perspectives presented within this book.