The Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts, Department of English, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program present "RuPaul before Supermodel: Starrbooty and the Performance of Literal Blackness." This talk examines RuPaul’s performance of racialized drag as “Starrbooty” in the 1980s. As shown in several clips from three narrative videos, Starrbooty performs a unique kind of “literal Blackness” in which she subverts the dominant racial discourses of Ronald Reagan’s America by actually inhabiting them as literally as possible. Through this campy form of literalism, Starrbooty thus changes the terms of assimilation and clears room for the figure of the Black drag queen within mainstream American culture just as she is—just as RuPaul accomplished years later with the hit TV show Drag Race. Michael P. Bibler is Professor of English at LSU. He is author of Literally: The Queerness of Things Just as They Are and Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic, and he is co-editor of the literary reprint series Radical Souths at UNC Press and the essay collection Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South. Under the pseudonym Paul Pycraft, he is also author of the children's picture book The Octopus's Holiday: A Different Kind of Christmas Story. This in-person talk will be held at the Denbo Center in the Seminar Room.