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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 12:1 (2023) ► pp.98–134

“You know she didn’t have no country”

Codeswitching and performing sass on RuPaul’s Drag Race

| Leiden University , Netherlands

This study focuses on switches into and out of African American English among contestants of the television series RuPaul’s Drag Race. Following Barrett (1995), I note that Black contestants who are comfortable in White Middle-Class American English tend to use it as their primary dialect, switching to AAE in order to develop rapport. I suggest that non-Black performers switch into AAE either in order to mitigate the effects of comments which might otherwise be interpreted as rude, or to reinforce strength in moments of emotional self-disclosure, and that this is possibly reflective of an interpretation on the part of the speaker that forwardness and strength constitute a normal element – ‘sass’ – of Black women’s speech. Finally, I explore the possible social impact of this phenomenon from the perspective of two common themes in the popular discourse on race: one centered on cultural appropriation, the other on the perception of Black Women’s Language.

Keywords: queer language, women’s language, African-American English, drag queens, sociolinguistics, codeswitching, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Data
    • 3.1AAE as ‘performing sass’
    • 3.2Other functions: Gossip, front-stage humor and building rapport
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1‘Performing sass’, ‘realness’, and cultural appropriation
    • 4.2AAE in drag and normative views of Black womanhood
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.20001.kon
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