Reading is a unique interactional practice in the drag queen community. It refers to leveling
witty and often cutthroat mock insults at fellow drag queens, with an aim of
throwing shade. In this paper, I
examine the discourse of the ‘reading challenge’, a staple of
RuPaul’s Drag
Race
(
RPDR), an internationally popular drag queen reality TV show (2009–). In the first
part, I review central concepts surrounding drag performance and the phenomenon of
RPDR and summarize relevant
sociolinguistic literature about drag queen speech and the practice of
reading. In the second part, I describe
the
RPDR reading challenge as a unique discursive genre and analyse its performative structure, themes, and most
prominent strategies that queens use to construct felicitous reads and throw shade. The analysis demonstrates that this genre
relies on camp language and highly ritualized, repetitive, and recontextualized performance of reading, framed by requirements of
mass-consumed reality TV.