Rogue Jotería Platformization:
Digital Latinx Drag Pedagogy Amidst Rising Anti-Drag Legislation
Digital Latinx Drag Pedagogy Amidst Rising Anti-Drag Legislation
José Ramón Lizárraga, Arturo Cortez, Mariel Reyes-Galvez
Abridged Theoretical Framework
- Drag performers as Cyborg Jotería Pedagogues and audiences build sophisticated assemblages of digital and physical spaces to co-construct their identities and cultural literacies (Lizárraga & Cortez, 2019, 2020).
- Platform ecologies as playgrids, “[...] produced when learners knit together social media tools to participate across settings and scales, accomplish their goals, pursue interests, and make their learning more enjoyable and personally meaningful” (Hollett & Kalir, 2017, p. 236).
- "Conducer" paradigm: an individual who simultaneously consumes and produces content; a hybrid role that is particularly evident in digital environments, where users engage interactively with multiple sites media with dexterity, thereby blurring the lines between production and consumption. (Garlick, 2004).
Rogue Jotéria Platformization
Two main activities of Rogue Joteria Platformization that we aim to highlight:
- "Estás en tu casa" (You are in your home.): This practice is more than an invitation; it is a declaration of collective belonging, an acknowledgment that creation is not solitary but inherently communal.
- "Como mugre y uña," where dirt under the nail exists together, inseparable, this practice blurs boundaries between performer and audience, creator and participant. In this world, to consume is to create, to witness is to shape, and to be in cahoots, complicit, or a co-conspirator is to be deeply entwined in the labor of building new queer futures.
Rogue Jotería Platformization: Ecological Resistance, Artistry, and Joy
Decolonial Fandom: RuPawl’s Sociopolitical Presence
- RuPawl as Queer Digital Conducer: RuPawl, a dogggie drag queen with a strong social media presence, embodies digital queer pedagogy, remix culture, and Latinx pride through drag-inspired content and activism.
- Latinx Representation in Global All Stars: During RPDR: Global All Stars, RuPawl spotlighted Latinx queens Gala Varo and Miranda Lebrão, recreating their lewks and posting in Spanish and Portuguese, positioning itself as a symbol of Latinx queer belonging.
- Fan Reception and Rogue Archiving: RuPawl’s content was reshared by the queens and celebrated by Latinx fans, functioning as a “rogue archive” that preserved cultural expressions sidelined by the franchise’s dominant narratives.
- Critique of Linguistic Imperialism: As the season progressed, RuPawl publicly critiqued the show's linguistic and cultural biases, especially the marginalization of non-English-speaking queens, exemplifying “como mugre y uña” (critique inseparable from participation).
- Shift from Celebration to Resistance: RuPawl’s stance evolved into direct sociopolitical critique, invoking cultural humility and naming systemic inequities in the franchise’s treatment of Latinx queens.
- Community Amplification: Other Latinx queens and fans joined the critique, further highlighting long-standing biases against Mexican and non-English-speaking drag artists in the Drag Race universe.
- Rogue Jotería Platformization: RuPawl’s transition illustrates how digital drag fandom can shift from joyful tribute to active resistance, aligning with theories of queer futurity and decolonial world-making.
- Ongoing Question: Can Latinx queer drag can ever be fully liberated within mainstream structures like Drag Race, reinforcing RuPawl’s role as a cultural and political disruptor.
A very demure streamer: Marisol Lord’s micro-interactional rogue jotería.
- Marisol Lords as Drag Gamer-Conducer: A Peruvian drag queen and Twitch streamer, Marisol blends drag artistry with gaming, cultivating community through Get Ready With Me (GRWM) streams and gameplay.
- Establishing Queer Latinx Space: Through humor and innuendo rooted in albur, Marisol invites viewers into culturally intimate spaces that center queer Latinx belonging and self-fashioning.
- Co-Creation of Drag Performance: Marisol actively involves viewers in decisions about makeup and persona creation, modeling reciprocal knowledge-sharing and disrupting typical influencer hierarchies—an act of Rogue Jotería Platformization.
- Ethic of Relational Humility: Her thoughtful engagement with cosmetic brands reflects Latinx cultural values of care, reciprocity, and restraint, resisting the extractive norms of platform capitalism.
- Collaborative Gameplay Design: Viewers influence her game choices and strategies, illustrating "Como mugre y uña"—the inseparability of performer and audience—and weaving drag into both physical and digital play.
- Drag as Embodied Roleplay: In gameplay cosplay (e.g., as Susan Storm), Marisol queers the gaming landscape through narrative disidentification, performing drag across avatars and identities.
- Resistance to Harm in Real-Time: During a stream, Marisol confronted hate speech, modeling collective resistance and abolitionist praxis, transforming gameplay into a site of digital accountability and education.
- Speculative Activism and World-Making: Her streams serve as living pedagogies where drag, critique, and community coalesce—realizing the potential of Rogue Jotería Platformization to reimagine sociotechnical futures.
Discussion
- Queer Learning as Movement: Educational research on queer praxis must capture learning as dynamic, emergent, and ephemeral; moving across everyday spaces and resisting rigid analytic frames (Gutiérrez, 2020; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014).
- Utopian Methodologies: Inspired by Muñoz (1996) and Rajala et al. (2023), we argue that fleeting queer world-building moments are glimpses of utopia; never fully realized but always in motion and relationally created.
- Improvisation and Strategic Opacity: Practices like chat-based exchanges, remix culture, and translanguaging rely on being intentionally illegible to dominant structures, aligning with theories of queer opacity and resistance (Tuck & Yang, 2014; Keeling, 2019; Rodríguez, 2014).
- Ethical Tensions in Research: Capturing resistant practices risks overexposing them to academic scrutiny; researchers must navigate the contradiction between visibility and the need for illegibility in queer resistance.
- Reflexive and Partial Inquiry: We embrace speculative, fragmentary, and affective methodologies that foreground relationality, co-interpretation, and untranslatability (Sedgwick, 2020; Love, 2007).
- Rogue Jotería as Living Ecology: Rather than mapping queer digital practices as fixed sites, we argue for experiencing and honoring them as dynamic ecologies; sometimes best left unread or incomplete.
- Research as World-Building: Qualitative inquiry into queer futurities is not passive observation but active participation in speculative world-making...messy, embodied, and ever-evolving (Halberstam, 2011; Ahmed, 2006; Lizárraga, 2023).
