Repetition, recitation and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo: Miss Vanjie and the culture-producing power of performative speech in RuPaul's Drag Race

In this chapter, I suggest that RPDR’s success is due, in part, to its dialogue with its fans through participatory culture and that the ambiguity of the phrase “Miss Vanjie” lends itself to the remixing and reappropriation inherent in meme creation. Particularly, what made the Miss Vanjie phrase so remarkable in season ten is its performative power, transforming it from a mere form of self identification into a rebellion of populist rhetoric upon its utterance. Miss Vanjie was placed as a “disidentifcatory non-citizen” (from Muñoz 1999) because she broke the tension of the localized hegemony of the show, thereby illustrating how resistance can be asserted through self-identification.