- Queer Highlight: Nhuja’s Turn
    Continuing our E-Board Highlight takeover/Kevin’s break from their essays, this week it is Nhuja’s turn to share their queer gem below (hence the subject line lol), enjoy!
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    RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15’s grand finale has aired and we must debrief (now that enough time has passed)! Our reigning Queen of Queens (All Stars 8), Jinkx Monsoon, gave a world-stopping performance of When You’re Good To Mama in honor of her historic role in Broadway’s Chicago. Jinkx left me speechless, absolutely in awe of her unparalleled talent and ability to dominate any room she’s in. 

    Then, our Season 14’s Willow Pill passed her crown onto the iconic and legendary Sasha Colby! British Vogue knew Sasha Colby mothered ahead of time and blessed the world with this stunning shoot. Watch Drag Race!

 

    My dear beloved oSTEM members… I write this queer highlight early on a Wednesday morning with my cold can of BudLight by my side! I felt obliged to get ready for a fight, at least in a symbolic manner (more on that later), since what I thought was a culture war confined mostly within the blue realms of troll twitter had escaped and infiltrated the blue realms of troll government. BudLight went woke right on time for my woke slut summer schedule, but it would not come without a fight.

    One of the episodes in the podcast ACID HORIZON talks about application of Baudrillard’s project in thinking about the relationship between reality and the hyper-real matrix of media that surrounds it to make sense of present global crises. It fit well with what happened when Dylan Mulvaney uploaded a promotion video for Bud Light on her instagram to celebrate “365 days of womanhood” with a BudLight can with her face on it–and BudLight received not only vile anti-trans backlash but its sales plummeted 17% in dollars and 21% in volume as of recent. Two of its executives are on the hot seat and the internet took off with #BoycottBudLight and videos of people throwing away their BudLight stocks. It became clear that while a war on the realm of material reality might be suppressed or postponed, war on the symbolic can still make a real difference. A face on a beer can was all it took to bring out the concoction of emotions and actions that lead to actual wars–and all it took to make me start drinking beer. Clearly, the time has come where one instagram post or one tweet (remember Eli Lilly and Company?) can have a real effect on real money. While the anti-trans internet jolt is traumatizing and horrifying to say the least, I think in a way, if we go back to Baudrillard and realize how his concept of simulation and simulacra has been legitimized by analysis of recent events, then his ideas naturally extend to his critique of identity as a fixed stable category and how identity is instead constructed through images and simulations rather than being based on an underlying reality. As the veil between reality and symbolism gets thinner, we get closer to realizing gender as a social construct once and for all.