We All Country

Carrie and Megan talk with Dr Bryce McCleary, Lecturer in Linguistics at Rice University, about his paper “'We All Country': Region, Place, and Community Language among Oklahoma City Drag Performers".

Australia referendum

Chapters

• 12:40 Interview with Bryce McCleary

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: Hey, here we are, and we have a great episode today. I'm so excited for everyone to hear it.

Carrie: Yeah, it's really fun. I once again, learned some stuff like how to use the word bitch.

Megan: Yeah. Which is always good to know.

Carrie: Yeah, it was a great time. Yeah, it was a really great time.

Megan: There's some light in the dark world, this episode, I believe.

Carrie: Yes. So speaking of dark world, but not the darkest possible part I think we can we could talk about. I don't know if you heard, did you hear that they were going to change the Australian constitution adding more indigenous voices into the...

Megan: No, I've not heard anything about this.

Carrie: Okay. So the referendum would have... this is all it would've done. The referendum would've created an advocacy committee to offer advice to parliament on policies that affect indigenous people.

Megan: Okay. So this would've included indigenous people on this advocacy committee, I'm hoping so.

Carrie: I assume it would be completely made up of indigenous people.

Megan: Yes. You'd hope so. Okay. So this is what it's going to do. 

Carrie: That what it's going to do.

Megan: Seems simple and clear and good.

Carrie: Yeah. Not even that powerful.

Megan: No.

Carrie: It's such a minor change to the Constitution. I almost can't even believe it's a change to the Constitution. You're just creating an advocacy group. Yeah, that's it. Tiny.

Megan:
It's one of those things where you're like, how is that not already a thing?

Carrie: Well, I can see why it's not a thing, but it just seems like such a small ask that I can't believe...

Megan: Yeah. It's tiny.

Carrie: ...that the results are at least 60% against.

Megan: People are 60% against this?

Carrie: Yeah, the vote has come in and as of, I don't know, last time I checked, it was 60% against. 60% no.

Megan: I think there are moments like these where I think I must be more naive than I think I am, because I'm like, this is such a simple, easy yes.

Carrie: How does it impact your life if you're not indigenous barely at all? So why not just say yes?

Megan: Do people think it's going to affect their lives though in a negative way? People in power think that they're going to have some of their power taken away from them.

Carrie: I guess, but honestly, not really. The Parliament doesn't have to listen.

Megan: It's true. Yeah. Again, the advocacy group would suggest things, and of course, I would hope that these suggestions would be taken very seriously and that some of them would be implemented. But that's not even the part that's being added to the Constitution, that suggestions that have been made are being added. It's just the creation of this group and they can't even...

Carrie: Then they would have some formalized power, but so minimal. It's so minimal. Well, the percent of population in Australia, this indigenous is 3%. So they're a tiny minority and Canada, it's 5%.

Megan: Do you know what it is here? Isn't it like 2% here or 1%? I think I just saw this. Ding it.

Carrie: Let's look it up.

Megan: Yeah. I just saw it. So US News and World Report says that it's 2.6% of the total population.

Carrie: 2.6%?

Megan: Yeah. Of the US.

Carrie: Yeah. So that's even smaller than Australia. Can you imagine a referendum like this in the US and how it would go?

Megan: Right now, it probably wouldn't go so well. Weird.

Carrie: It would not. It would probably maybe similar. In Canada too, even though the population is slightly bigger I don't think they would necessarily pass.

Megan: There's going to be that whole, well then we need advocacy group for the white people to talk about our needs because blah, blah, blah, something.

Megan: I don't know. I just trying to put myself in people's shoes that say such ridiculous things. It's hard to imagine what is the problem that they're having with this.

Carrie: Yeah. It's just a lack of... a perceived loss of power. Again, I don't even think it's really that a loss of power. I think it's only perceived loss of power.

Megan: It is perceived loss of power.

Carrie: Because the advocacy group is just advocating for things, it wouldn't actually have any formal say. Parliament would still vote the way it normally votes. If your population is only 3%, you're not going to have a huge say in that vote.

Megan: It does remind me of something positive, though. I just finally started reservation dogs, which is fantastic.

Carrie: Yeah, it is. I haven't finished it because whatever channel it is, I don't have. I got to have the first four or five episodes or whatever it was.

Megan: Yeah. Of the first season?

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Megan: Okay. Because there's three seasons now. But I've watched two episodes now, and I'm just so impressed. It just reminds me of this, because they have on the second episode, this conversation between an older white couple and they pass by some graffiti that says land back. And they were just discussing what does that mean? The man is saying they don't mean like all the land back. The woman was just like, just shut the fuck up. You're part of the problem. I noticed the Res English too in the show. It's great.

Carrie: Yeah. Apparently, some of it like we were talking about in our Res English episode, we talk about how some of these things are all over the continent, but some of what's happening is unique to that region. I don't know if it's just Oklahoma or if it's surrounding area too, but apparently Sonics and instead of saying Sonic is a more Oklahoman Res English thing.

Megan: Oh, really? Okay.

Carrie: Yeah. That's what I read anyway. Because that wouldn't be a thing here at all because we don't have Sonic.

Megan: Okay. In Canada, it's like, what do you mean here?

Carrie: At least in this part of Canada. I can't speak for all of Canada, but I don't think it's in Canada.

Megan: Yeah. Oh, hey, our episode today is concentrated in Oklahoma.

Carrie: That's true. Hey.

Megan: Hey, I didn't mean to do that, but there's that connection because I didn't know what you were going to tell me. 

Carrie: That's true.

Megan: Yeah. The only reason why I even saw this is because an Australian linguist said something about how sad he was that this had happened. I was like, oh, no, because I didn't know that the vote was happening. I just hadn't seen the results.

Megan: Right. Didn't know they'd be so dire. This is not even like a close vote.

Carrie: I'm not surprised, actually. Having these kinds of things up for democratic vote always make me worried because I'm like, I don't know, man. People will vote for super bloodthirsty things. I don't know if it's still the case, but 20 years ago, if you had a referendum in Canada for death penalty, it would pass.

Megan: Yeah. In Canada?

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Megan: But not today.

Carrie: Well, I don't know. I'm just saying I know that those were the numbers back then. I don't know what the numbers are right now. I No, it's immoral. So I shouldn't put immoral things up to vote.

Megan: I know.

Carrie: But just we couldn't. The courts would shoot it down no matter what. The courts have said, no, you can't have death penalty, so there's no death penalty.

Megan: That's nice. That's not the case down here. Down under. Not down under. We talking about Australia not down under.

Carrie: Down under from Canada. Yes.

Megan: Yes. It was down under for Canada.

Carrie: But almost everywhere's down under from us.

Megan: It's true. Yeah. Is it cold there yet? Not quite.

Carrie: No. Oh my God, it is so warm. Today, I don't think it's as warm, but it has been like Vancouver's summer temperatures. I am like, well, we're boned.

Megan: That sucks. Yeah, I know. We're having unseasonably high as well, but anything under 100, I'm just like, yay. It's fall. Which is depressing.

Carrie: I remember.

Megan: It is depressing. Although it gets me into the 50s at night, so that's nice.

Carrie: No, it gets definitely very cool overnight here, it's more like the daytime temperatures are still way too high, but at least it does get what I would even call cold.

Megan: Right. Yeah. I know. Other people are like, wow, down to the 50s. Oh, that's so low. No.

Carrie: Just try living in southern Arizona or in Central Arizona and come back and explain to us.

Megan: Yeah. No, exactly. Anytime someone makes fun of me for being cold intolerant, I'm like, you should see my heat tolerance or what we have to go through here.

Carrie: Yeah. I don't have tolerance for either. Which is why I now live in Vancouver, which basically doesn't really have either, anyway. I know what I need to do.

Megan: Patreon.

Carrie: Yes. Patreon. Yes. So you can get free access, I think it's for a week. We have a bunch of people who are doing that right now. So thank you for trying it that out.

Megan: Yeah. Thank you.

Carrie: But also, I would like to thank our newest Patreon. Renee Kenop. I think that's how you say it. I apologize if I did it wrong.

Megan: Thank you, Renee.

Carrie: Yeah. So again, if you want to join us, we're at patreon.com/vocalfriespod.

Megan: We have so many bonus episodes at this point that you can...

Carrie: 60-something?

Megan: Yeah, that you can go back into and listen to. They are all over the place of topics, so that's fun.

Carrie: Yes. It's where we play around a little bit more, I guess.

Megan: We rant and rave. Not that we don't do that here. Get salty.

Carrie: We get salty here for sure.

Megan: Yeah. We keep it profesh over here. That's something that people would definitely say about this podcast. My God, I've listened to some podcasts lately and I'm like, the sound quality, I'm surprised that these podcasts that have, however many episodes, and still the sound quality is pretty poor. So I think our Indie Podcast has some really great... sound is really great. I just like to say that.

Carrie: Yeah, most of them do. There are a couple episodes that were subpar, but yeah, I think mostly we do a good job making sure that our audio sounds okay. Our editor does a great job.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you to our editor. Yeah. So please, if you can please support this Indie Podcast and it helps us pay for the transcriptions, which are so important to us to provide.

Carrie: And the editor.

Megan: Yes, and our editor. Which makes it so much easier for Carrie, who was editing for so long.

Carrie: Yes. It's not my favorite thing to do. 

Megan: Yeah. Give it to someone who actually wants to be paid to...

Carrie: Who enjoys doing it. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly. Who has to listen to us all the time, but that's okay.

Carrie: All the time, once a month.

Megan: All the time. Anyway.

Carrie:  All right. So thank you so much and enjoy this episode. 

Megan: Yeah, enjoy. 

Carrie: All right. So we're very excited to have Dr. Bryce McCleary, who is a lecturer in linguistics at Rice University. Their research focuses on language and identity, particularly concerning gender and sexuality. Their research often centers around the voices of LGBTQ+ communities, their awareness of language, and the important role language plays in navigating increasingly difficult cultural terrain in the United States. They're also the author of the paper We All Country Region Plays and Community Language Among Oklahoma City Drag Performers. So, welcome.

Megan: Yeah, welcome. Thanks for being here with us.

Bryce McCleary: Of course. Thank you very much for having me. I'm a fan of the show. I'm very, very happy and excited to be here, to be invited. It's a great pleasure and an honor.

Carrie: Oh, thank you.

Megan: Thank you for saying so. Well, we feel the same way about you.

Bryce: Yes.

Carrie: Yeah. I saw this paper and I thought, yes, we want to have someone talking about drag performers. We've never talked about that. That's amazing.

Bryce: Well, I think that it's one of those things that has always been, people care about drag or like drag or maybe dislike drag, and it's always been around, but in the last couple of years, there's just such a spotlight on it, for better or worse. Well, mostly for worse, but actually also it's drawing a lot of attention and support to drag. So I feel like it's a really timely subject to be thinking about, especially in a venue like Vocal Fries. It's the perfect place to be talking about drag research and sociolinguistics, especially in a time when everyone... it's just center stage right now in American politics, I think.

Carrie: 100%.

Megan: It is. Was it the Oscars when the person that won for Best Director or Best Movie, he was thanking his parents for letting him dress up and how dressing up in women's clothes hurts no one. So that too, it's just everywhere.

Bryce: Yeah. Understandably so, because actually, just to, I guess, get it out of the way now because there's so much more cool stuff to talk about than the silly political games that are being played by targeting drag. It's actually all a distraction, I think. 

Megan: Yeah. Absolutely.

Carrie: Of course it is. It's fascism. That's what they do. They distract.

Bryce: Exactly. Climate crisis and the gun issue, and voting rights, those are all the things that they're trying to distract people from. And painting one subpopulation of the broader LQBTQ+ umbrella as dangerous to children. This is actually a really old tactic.

Megan: Yes, 100%.

Bryce: It's not even interesting to look at anymore.

Megan: Absolutely. 

Carrie: No. But drag is.

Bryce: Yes, it is. It absolutely is. 

Carrie: So why did you want to write this article? 

Bryce: Well, that's such a great question. Okay, so the simple answer is that this was my PhD dissertation and I needed to make that into something that could be published.

Megan: I love the honesty.

Bryce: But this particular paper, this particular version of stuff that was done for the dissertation actually came out of the COVID era digital scholarship when no one could go to meetings. We couldn't go hang out with other linguists. All the conferences were either postponed or digital. So the LSA, the Linguistic Society of America put on a series of different webinars. I think they were inspired by the [foreign word] and they did that Al Vivo series, which was awesome. So I actually got asked to be in two different panels, one for LSA and one for Abralin. In both of them, I was just doing an overview of what I call queer folk linguistics, which is a bridging of folk linguistics and sociocultural linguistics. One of the things that seemed to get a lot of interest was how I essentially said that when you actually start asking, especially queer people about place or region, and perhaps especially in places like the American South, we start to see that even though sociolinguistics has this history of treating region and place as a static variable that actually it could be quite intersectional and quite complex for people.

So this led to some discussions and my co-editor for the special issue actually said, well, why don't we just put out feelers and say, people who are interested in this are doing work on this. If they'd like, we can see if American Speech would be interested. They were. So I just took a lot of the talk that I had from drag performers in Oklahoma City and what they had to say about the place in which they do drag. That's what the article was all about, trying to highlight that a place like Oklahoma City, and particularly this safe haven, what they call the Gabe Hood or the Strip is itself complicated, but also in a really intersectional way because it's within probably at least one of the two only metropolitan areas within the state in a state that's notably conservative and not always safe or celebratory of LGBTQ+ peoples. So that complicates the relationship between place and what we can say about its relationship to language variation and language change. That was a really long way of answering that. I'm sorry.

Megan: That's a beautiful way of answering that. 

Carrie: No, that's great. 

Megan: Do you have a personal connection to Oklahoma City?

Bryce: Yeah, I'm from there. I grew up there. I was probably 21, 22 when I went to my first drag show there. This is both personal and I think I can make the claim that drag has and still does play a significant role in Oklahoma City's gay neighborhood. It just so happens to also be down the street from Oklahoma City University, which has a really big theater, music, and nursing program that I believe still offers a scholarship for male nurses based on gender, to bring in nurses who identify as male, which is really fun. But it's down the street and so it gets lots of young people to the area as well as being the place where the Gay Pride Parade always has its terminus and ends with the big party there. That's been going on a long time before I was even there. But so my growing up and experiencing that, it was just always in the back of my mind. By the time I made it to grad school, someone said, why don't you study the drag community? Why don't you look at them? I thought, why don't I do that? I should totally do that.

Carrie: Yeah. You brought up queer folk linguistics. Can you describe what that is?

Bryce: Yeah. Okay, I'm going to back up here. I get too excited. So, I think one of my favorite ways to remind people of why Folk Linguistics matters is that, I think that it's probably always been the case that socio-linguists in particular have said that what people think or care or believe about language matters. There's a particular, I think one of the first sociolinguistics conferences that happened in UCLA in the 1960s. There's a discussion that's going on and one of them, or one participant in that is of course, William Labov, who is cited often in sociolinguistics who says, well if you go around and you listen to people talking about language and you hear them say things about, like Nasality for example, they'll hear someone who's really nasalized, but they could also hear someone who's denasalized a lot and they'll call both of them nasal. So his whole argument was, so how can we trust the non-linguists? They don't really know what they're talking about. By the 1990s, Dennis Preston starts writing about, well, wait a minute, what if actually they just don't have a technical term for inappropriate levels of Nasality? So by talking about something being nasal, that's just the vocabulary they've got and they're actually accurately identifying too much or too little based on their own experience of nasality. So this leads into Preston's work on folk linguistics, namely asking non-linguists what they think about language, how they react to certain varieties of language, what they believe about it. 

Queer folk linguistics then takes that same methodology. I attempted applying that to queer populations in Oklahoma. One of the things that seemed important to me was that sometimes you get explicit stuff like, oh, that guy over there, he sounds real dumb, he says things like, ain't, and I ain't going nowhere. That's just real uneducated. But sometimes you get things that are more presuppositional or implicit. Things that are not so explicitly that language is X or Y. So I started to think that, first of all, I'm always reminded when I talk about this, of a quote from Law Ziman, who is certainly one of the most cited socio linguists working in language, gender, and sexuality. He was giving a talk at a special event or panel at one of the Linguistic Society of America's meetings. He said that trans people are natural linguists, and it was just such a poignant thing to say, because people who are non-cisgender who live lives that require a sensitivity to language to navigate or otherwise, to think about how people are referring to them and what kinds of work it takes to either put up with that or correct people or decide if it's worth doing that. Of course, you can make parallels to other peoples that are either not trans or who live other kinds of lives too. Different kinds of people have different linguistic experiences. But I'm always brought back to that and thinking about how when non-linguists are talking about language, they're always doing identity work. They're always saying like, I think this way and that says something about me and how I see language and I use language. So that's a really long way of saying what I tried to do was sort of marry the Princetonian tradition of folk linguistics or a broader interest in language regard with a sociocultural linguistic analysis. How is this always working towards the practice of identity? I think that the tools or traditions we have in sociocultural linguistics when dealing with queer populations of people when we know to just not take certain things for granted or to assume that queer people are somehow doing extra identity work, when that's certainly not the case. Keeping those, the things that we've gleaned from both those channels of research and trying to put them together, that's essentially what folk linguistics is trying to do. If that makes any sense.

Megan: I love it so much...

Carrie: It does.

Megan: ...because it relates to how I describe myself. If I'm giving a talk or something and doing positionality, I'll say that I'm a linguist and then I'll say, I have a PhD in linguistics, but I'm also a linguist at heart. I think it's getting to that folk linguistic thing because I became a linguist because of all these ideas of why don't I... my dad speak Spanish, why don't I speak Spanish? So me trying to figure out, and the ideas that I had about language and all of that were what make me linguist at heart. I like the idea that everyone is a linguist because we all have language and we all have ideas about it.

Bryce: Absolutely. Well, they're inseparable. We acquire a language, whatever dialect we grow up around or dialects we grow up around. But people talk about language and they talk about using things in certain ways. It's impossible to imagine acquiring a language without also acquiring some of the social or cultural connections we make with certain ways of speaking in certain ways of being.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Okay. So why is it important to research the language of drag performers?

Bryce: Yeah, also a great question and one that I feel like I have to start by saying, of course, this has been exampled by Rusty Barrett's work before I ever started doing this. Barrett looked at drag performers in Texas. In fact, what I tell my students today, which is really great, because a lot of them who take... like this fall, for example, at Rice, I'll be teaching our language, gender, and sexuality course. It's one of those classes that gets lots of people who not just Ling majors. And there's usually a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race fans who are in there. I tell them that the first real piece of sociolinguistic research to look at drag queens included Coco Montrece, who is now an icon of RuPaul's Drag Race. But in this study, Barrett talked about how drag performers are able to do what he called a stylistic polyphony or proliferous voices. That is, that they would use different dialects, different styles, different ways of speaking in the same performance. A lot of people talk about this or bring it up when they sight-bear it. But what they often forget about is that what clearly is an intentional aspect of this is the juxtaposition of two very different sounding styles so that you can get a drag queen saying like, hi, y'all, welcome to the show, but don't act up, buster. These very different-sounding voices put next to each other. I think that there's the fact that this is clearly employed for humor or entertainment should probably tell us, especially as socio-linguists, that that means that things are going to change in a way that reflects what's going on in society or what's relevant in society. So I think that's one reason why, to continue looking at drag performers and how they talk. But I think another added element of that is that drag performers and the way that they perform highlights the ways that we're all always doing drag no matter when we're feeling our most comfortable to when we're being our most professional or silly, we're always practicing some aspect of our identity. I think that drag allows a really nice example of how we can think about that or model that in a way, because it does feel more deliberate when it's done on a stage with sometimes ridiculous or elaborate presentations.

Megan: Yeah. What can we get when we look at one specific place like Oklahoma City?

Bryce: Yeah, that's such a great question. So for example, Oklahoma, I think just linguistically is fascinating. It's one of the newer states because for the longest time, it was just an area where indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from largely the eastern tract of unseized or sovereign territory of southeastern tribes moved to Oklahoma and was also, people don't know this, but a place where many formerly enslaved peoples also moved prior to the so-called land runs. So it was actually an already diverse and complicated place prior to these land runs in which unseated territories. So for example, we're talking about Cherokee tribes being marched from the eastern coast, but this is also the unseated territory of Wichita, Osage nations who were already there in this particular place. Then more land gets opened up. Then of course we get a rush of largely white settlers, but they came from the Midlands, from the upper South, from Texas and the lower South.

So by the time Oklahoma's a state, its dialect logically quite diverse and culturally diverse. I think a lot of that history is actually still present if you look around the state. When we look at a place like Oklahoma City's 39th Street, you've got a rich cultural makeup that I think is at times reflective of Oklahoma's diverse makeup, but also in a way that's, I don't know, even more celebratory of this eclectic mix of people because there's lots of Spanish language, there's lots of African American language varieties, there's lots of class-based distinctions with how people talk within this particular community. There's a lot of mixed feelings about whether or not Oklahoma is a good place to live and do drag.

Megan: Right. Sure.

Bryce: Yeah. So I think that on the purely social science side of things, it's just fascinating. There's a lot of different attitudes and ideas about this place, but I don't want to suggest that that means that everyone who does drag here hates living here. That's actually not the case. There's a lot of people for whom this has been their home for generations and for whom this is a place where enacting change means more than packing up and leaving.

Megan: So you and I are both born and raised in the south, but I'm from the southwest and I think about how Arizona is a place where people assume it's not a good place to live. I think it might be similar to how people view Oklahoma City. I had family in Oklahoma, so I've been to Oklahoma City and I had ideas about Oklahoma when I was little too because My dad's Mexican, my mom is not. So I had these ideas that it was a racist place, but then I'm thinking people think Arizona is this terribly racist place as if our society isn't racist. It's a bigger picture. 

Bryce: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think that a lot of the understanding that we get of this, and don't get me wrong, Oklahoma by some metrics is absolutely a racist place.

Megan: Yeah. Right.

Bryce: It absolutely is. Growing up, my stepdad is part African-American and part Samoan. So I have younger siblings who are also of mixed race. So growing up as a kid, I was sheltered from a lot because I was just in this multiracial family where this is just what life looked like. We were also country. We did not live in the city property. We lived in the outskirts. So I knew that we were all country. I know that's related to where we're going with time of this article.

Megan: Yes.

Bryce: But I knew that we were all country. But I didn't realize that for a lot of people, I think that there's this association with being rural and being country means being conservative white, but actually Oklahoma does not support that. You can find plenty of evidence to the alternative that there are lots of people of non-white or other kinds of backgrounds in rural Oklahoma. So actually to be country or to be rural doesn't have this one-to-one correspondence, despite how we might often think of it and it's another way of... I'm just gushing about Oklahoma, I guess today.

Megan: No, that's great. Well, it's so good to get some context from people that have the context, because like I said, I've been to Oklahoma and have family from Oklahoma, but the context was still missing even though I had that connection because I wasn't living in it. Just when you said that you lived in this multicultural and multiracial family, I'm thinking, wow, I just never thought about that Oklahoma City. In my head, I'm still like, oh wow. Then the idea that country doesn't equal conservative, I definitely have that one-to-one correspondence in my head.

Carrie: Yeah. Especially Arizona. I really think that there's a closer, it's not 100%, but there's a closer correlation country. Well, I used to, wouldn't use the word country, but rural and conservative is pretty closely related unlike Oklahoma.

Bryce: Yeah. Well, in Oklahoma, you have places like Boley, Oklahoma, which is a largely black town, and where they host the Boley rodeo, which is a famous black rodeo or predominantly black rodeo.

Carrie: Yeah, I've heard of this. 

Bryce: It's very country and very rural. I think that you look at some of these things and you look at place and you know what's categorized as rural versus urban, which most of Oklahoma is rural. Of course, we all have these correspondences, but it's not hard to find things that defy that and that remind us that the world is more complicated than even our perceptions of it as social scientists.

Carrie: Right. Always more complicated.

Megan: Well, and it's not fair to just have the idea in our heads that cowboys are Anglo because that's completely not true. 

Carrie: The first ones were not white.

Megan: Exactly.

Bryce: Absolutely. The Houston rodeo here, I got to experience that for the... seeing some of it for the first time since COVID and living here. I was just like, wow, this is so refreshing because it is such a diverse makeup of the cowboy as a genre. It's wonderful.

Carrie: Okay. So you brought up we All Country. What does that mean and why did you title your paper that?

Bryce: I'm really glad to get asked this because I'm a big fan of Foxy, the drag queen. Actually, this is a quote from her. When asked to characterize Dragon Oklahoma as all the participants were asked to do, she went on to talk about how it's very different. You've got black drag queens or drag performers, white drag performers, Latinx drag performers, indigenous drag performers, Oklahoma's got all this mixed, but she said, but we all country. In a way that sounds like a criticism if it's out of context, but actually, it's not. It was this thing that like, but we're all Oklahoman, we're all here, we're all going to be considered country compared to a New York City queen or a Los Angeles drag performer. If you go further south, maybe they'll even get further more country or more southern. But we all are here and we're all country queens. That doesn't mean that everyone's up there doing Dolly Parton or Casey Musgraves or anything that necessarily is indexical of a country music or country genre. But rather, I think it was this way of thinking about how Oklahoma performers have to exist in this case in the city, Oklahoma City in a state that's not really easy to exist in or to operate in as drag performers. So I thought of it as a cool way of reminding the reader that we think country, like we were just talking about, and we think Anglo, we think conservative, working class, but actually country can mean other things. For some of these performers, it doesn't necessarily have a racial component. It certainly doesn't seem to have necessarily a political component, but rather it's more of a general, regional, and perhaps even somewhat lifestyle component that life just moves slower in a place like Oklahoma City

Megan: Is class related?

Bryce: Yes. I think class related too, to some extent. Mostly middle, lower class, or working-class. I think that's probably fair to say. But yes.

Carrie: Well, it was obviously said with affection and I really did appreciate that. Of course, people often think of their identity in a positive way, but it was nice to feel like this word had been reclaimed, even though, I'm not sure that's the right word for it, but it was really refreshing to read that part of your paper.

Bryce: Thanks. Yeah. No, I agree. I think that it was never meant to be anything but positive as a unifying umbrella term that Foxy was using to talk about drag performers. That's why I chose to keep it in the title or to put it in the title because it was such a nice way of thinking about country as an inclusive term. Which I think is crazy.

Megan: No. It's beautiful. I'm so glad to think you're helping me out. So that's why I love our guests so much. It's expands my mind every time we talk to someone, because again, I know rationally for a fact, I have facts that country doesn't have to equate to Anglo and to all of these things that media has set up and portrayed. It doesn't have to be that way, but it still helps to have conversations with people like you to expand my conceptualization of it.

Bryce: Yeah. I feel the same way about talking to drag performers. I'm like, wow, I learned something every time I do this or every time I even listen to it.

Megan: What a job you have. It's amazing.

Bryce: Yeah, it's great. When I was doing this research, when I was out doing the field work, I was like, I'm just going to drag shows and staying up late talking to drag performers afterwards. Usually, it's the best way to do research.

Carrie: Yeah. Have you ever done any drag yourself?

Bryce: I have gotten in drag a few times for Halloween and whatnot, but no...

Carrie: Not like that?

Bryce: Not professionally and not with any kind of skill to [inaudible] that.

Carrie: Yeah. That's another thing. This is skills.

Bryce: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: Yeah. Because I guess, technically I've done drag for Halloween too. I was sigh for Halloween one year, but I didn't really conceptualize it that way, but it was.

Bryce: Yeah. Well of course. Then there's the notion that we're always doing dragon in one way or another. But yeah, to think about it as the elaborate dressing up and embellishing some aspect about the character we're doing. I think that everyone should try on a wig once in a while just to see how it makes them feel and see what it does.

Carrie: It's so itchy.

Bryce: Yeah. Well, that's tur.

Megan: Get a better wig then, Carrie. Get a better wig.

Bryce: A higher quality wig.

Carrie: Also the thing you put underneath it helps. But honestly, I think I have sensory issues because I just... but you should, you should still definitely try it.

Bryce: Yes.

Megan: Can we talk a little bit about the linguistic repertoire of drag performers? Because I'm thinking of, so you had... you gave us a little impression earlier, but I was thinking about there's the stereotypical Southern drawl. How is that employed in Oklahoma City?

Bryce: Yeah, well, I think that Oklahomans have a lot of the same social associations that we have with Southern Sound. Remember that I mentioned that Oklahoma is a dialect, logically diverse area, but it's certainly on what a professor of mine called Sarah Loss at Oklahoma State called the southern periphery. Meaning that it does have a lot of sound phonological stuff that seems to be borrowed from the south, where participants in the pin pen merger, lots of Oklahomans can say, what time is it? Instead of what time is it? But also there's a lot of Midland influence. So there's Oklahomans who can say, my car needs washed. So that that needs plus past simple construction that caught, caught merger, which I have to try really hard to distinguish, caught, caught.

Megan: Me too.

Carrie: I can't do it.

Bryce: Yeah. Well, iif we're, if you're from west of Ohio practically, you're a merger speaker. So there's some really fun stuff there. So I think that to some extent that Oklahoman drag performers can still use the southern-sounding stuff because it does, although we've got all these educational or intelligent, or politically oriented language attitudes, there's also that southern voices are kind and polite and very friendly. I think there's a lot of that that's played up on in drag performance. But there's so many other stylistics too. You can hear dialects of like Chicano English. So not even necessarily like... you absolutely can see Spanish in drag performance and sometimes in people talking on the mic in Oklahoma City. But you can get those kinds of stylistics, lots and lots of African-American language varieties used and employed by not just African-American identifying performers. So there's a lot of dialect, logical diversity, and stylistic diversity amongst the drag performers. Actually, it wasn't highlighted on in this article in particular, but one of the things I asked actually had two different questions and they were designed to target explicit versus implicit stuff. The first question is, is there a particular way that a drag performer talks? Almost everybody in response to this was like, oh, do you mean drag slang? I'd be like, yeah, sure. Tell me about it. So I got lots of lists of drag slang and I'll tell you something very cool about that. But the second question was, what does it mean to talk like a drag queen? Essentially this was to target the archetype of the drag queen.

So I was expecting to get more implicit presuppositional stuff, and I did. It was really fun. So there's lots of these things that bore out in conversations, but one of the really cool things in terms of drag slang is that we get a lot of work slay, wig, snatched, a lot of this stuff that we see now a lot in popular culture. But one of the fascinating things is that drag performers continually told me that bitch was a slang item. I kept thinking like, this is so interesting because I wouldn't think of this as slang. It's just a word that we have in English. It prompted me to go back and look. Sure enough, the paper I'm working on right now is actually that there are drag performers in Oklahoma City using bitch as a discourse marker.

Megan: Yay. How exactly?

Bryce: So the two pieces of information that have led me to this distinction is that it's not clear that anyone is being called bitch. It's just  like bitch, let me tell you what happened today, bitch. It could be a room pool of people. I'm like, okay, well who's the bitch? Who's getting called bitch. Then secondly, when it seems to end something like, okay, Foxy, for example, there's a quote I think I can almost do verbatim, where she says, she's talking about the kinds of music that she lips syncs to. She goes, if RuPaul's was back then bitch, I couldn't lips sync to save my life bitch, because a bitch don't know no country by heart, bitch. So there's lots of bitch in there and they're...

Megan: They're different.

Bryce: They're not all functioning the same way. But the ones where it's unclear as to if someone's... it's like, is it being used evocatively? Is someone being called bitch? Or is it helping to organize the information that comes before or after it? If the answer is yes, then of course it's a discourse marker. So it's really fun. There's really, really fun stuff that I haven't seen documented elsewhere. But I also think that this isn't new. That this is probably something that's been around in African-American women's speech or fem black speakers. Which, if there's one thing to take away from my work with drag queens in Oklahoma City, it's that, boy do we have a long history of totally not acknowledging that fem and female black speakers have given us all of the cool language that we use in drag and in pop culture. Almost all of it.

Megan: Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Is there a sense that it's appropriative in this space? It doesn't seem like it is in the same way in different spaces.

Bryce: So fascinating because what's really interesting is that when asking drag performers in this community how they feel about drag slang or what gets used, almost all of the younger, less experienced performers have really prescriptive attitudes about it. They'll say things like, oh yeah, well you got to know how to use drag slang right. When someone says that all Tino Shade or No Tino Shade, and they say these things and they don't know, it's like, girl, figure it out or you're not really gay or you don't have the right to say this. But actually all the older performers, especially the older performers who are performers of color tend to say, this stuff has been around for forever. The stuff that you're hearing on RuPaul's Drag Race or on TV, that's not them coming up with it. We've been saying that. So it's more important to know where it came from than to be policing people how to use it. It clearly shows a distinction between experience. We're talking about people who are like, hey, acknowledge me, I've been doing the same stuff. You're applauding them for. Whereas the younger speakers have more to lose. They're trying to establish themselves as genuine performers in-group members. So it's really fascinating that that doesn't directly answer your question about whether it's perceived as appropriated. I think that in some cases it is. But I think a lot of this seems to be like drag language. I think in some cases, depending on how it's used, is thought of as cultural currency. If you're able to use it, use it correctly and acknowledge that you're not the person who made it up or that it's been used for a long time, this is a way of signaling you belong to this group, or you're a member of this community rather than borrowing language and appropriating it from a particular, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about that, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Absolutely, yes.

Megan: Can we talk about what it means to use it correctly? Because this is a really important distinction because we're not talking prescriptively.

Bryce: Yeah. Well, okay, so this is really fascinating, right? When particularly the younger performers talk about how one should say like, so no tea, no shade. This is like, or all tea, no shade, for example. The no shade part is almost directly borrowed from... and you can see this in Paris is Burning in the documentary about 1980s, 1990s, Harlem Ball culture. This is clearly borrowed from signifying in the dozens in African-American language discourse practices where shade is just the art of ritual and soul making fun of each other. Lots of more experienced drag performers talk about needing thick skin or being able to take jokes and throw them back. It's just a part of community bonding. In fact, it's a way of showing that you respect somebody or like them if you can poke fun at them. So when someone says shade, that means like, I'm going to tell you something that's I'm not just trying to hurt your feelings. I'm letting you know something to let you know. If they say, all tea, I'm trying to tell you the truth. I'm trying to give you the business. Honestly, well, we're linguists, so of course, we would expect this, but context really makes the difference between using it correctly or not. I think that you can see some variation in how it gets used, but I also think that probably the more experienced you are, the more you can flounder some of these roles. The less experience you are, the more you see them as concrete. Perhaps the more inexperienced you are, and maybe the more I want to say white, you are. So one of the groups, the kinship systems I looked at here involves Foxy, who is an African American drag queen, and her daughter who is a white drag queen. So her daughter did not... Foxy had made comments in some of the interviews that some of the stuff she grew up hearing from her aunts or her uncles or people that she was around, it wasn't necessarily strictly drag, but for her daughter, the drag communities where she heard this language, it's where she learned about it and where she started to use it. So in that way, we do see an appropriation, but in a way that has a positive impact on family bonding. It shows a mentorship or connection to drag mother, if that makes sense.

Megan: It does. 

Carrie: It totally does. If anyone has not seen Paris is Burning, I do recommend it. I learned so much from that documentary for sure.

Bryce: Absolutely.

Carrie: To go back to your bitch as a discourse marker. As soon as you gave the example, I was like, oh yeah, I've heard that many times. That is a discourse marker. I never really thought about it. So I think it is quite old because If I've heard it, It's probably old.

Bryce: Well, that's what I was thinking too. Actually, in putting this paper together, it made me think Scott Keesling did all that work with dude.

Megan: Yeah. Exactly.

Bryce: Dude and bro, and we've seen how that's lost a lot of its gendered connotations. I think my sisters say dude and bro, way more than I ever did. Although that might be a gay thing or a queer thing. I just was like, ugh, I'm not going to say, dude. There's something [inaudible]. 

Megan: Yeah, I say dude a lot and a regional thing too maybe, but your sister's using more of regional [inaudible]

Carrie: For sure. 

Meghan: Over here on the West Coast it's like, dude, dude.

Carrie: Dude.

Bryce: Yeah. I think that that has to have a slightly fronted [inaudible]. You can't just be like, dude, it's got to be like, dude, dude. 

Meghan: Has to be. Yeah. In my head Carrie, are you not feeling that?

Carrie: Well, I'm just wondering because I'm not Californian and I'm Canadian. I'm like, I don't know if I do that. But maybe I do.

Bryce: Well, who knows?

Carrie: Who knows?

Bryce: Plus the moment you start thinking that you can or don't do something and try to test yourself, it's...

Meghan: It's no longer good data.

Bryce: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: The observed.

Bryce: Exactly.

Meghan: Speaking of the bomb.

Bryce: Exactly. The observer's paradox. But I think that actually thinking about bitch this way made me think, oh my God, wait a minute. Does that mean that dude and bro is also being used as a discourse marker?

Carrie: It is, yeah. 

Bryce: Yeah, of course it is. I think that we've just been thinking about it as purely like what you call somebody, but actually, at least in the drag community, there's no gendered connotation for who gets to say bitch or who's bitch called. Regardless of gender identity or gender presentation in drag, everyone can use bitch, everyone can be called bitch or can be in the discussion where bitch is being used. It's pretty cool.

Carrie: Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Meghan: They don't have to be part of the drag community to be... they could be referring to something outside of the drag community and use bitch. So it's not even just talking about the space, it's talking about anything. Is that what you found?

Bryce: Yeah, absolutely. Or that a speaker could be talking about... so it's really probably more indicative of the speaker. So not everyone is using bitch as a discourse marker, but the most evidence I have actually is from one particular drag family. So there seems to be a relationship there that these particular speakers are able to do so. But no, subject matter doesn't appear to be indicative of whether or not it will be used.

Meghan: That's cool. Yeah. I totally have dude as a discourse marker. 

Carrie: Yeah, me too.

Meghan: Because I say it with my partner but I'm not calling him dude. I'll say, dude, you wouldn't believe. I'm not referring to him.

Bryce: Right, you could say, whoa, you wouldn't believe this, or oh my God.

Meghan: Exactly.

Carrie: Or man. It's totally for me, a discourse marker mostly. Sometimes I'm actually referring to a person, but usually, if I am then it is gendered usually. But, as a discourse marker, I use it all the time and I try with certain people not to, because I think I might offend them, but it's just so part of my vocabulary.

Bryce: Oh yeah. Every time I talk to students about it, they're all like, oh yeah, dude. I use dude all the time. What's really fun is I compared bitch in my data to girl and girl gets used the same way. But I think that we have more racialized stereotypes of who uses girl or girlfriend.

Carrie: 100%.

Bryce: It both complicates it but also sheds light onto how this is not an entirely new phenomenon, but that this is maybe, perhaps a word we just haven't paid attention to yet.

Carrie: Yes, I agree. 

Meghan: I'm so excited about that. What an exciting paper. That's the one you're working on right now, Is A Discourse Marker?

Bryce: Mm-hmm.

Meghan: You're going to blow wide it open.

Carrie: It's really cool.

Meghan: Oh that's so exciting. So I'm thinking about intersectionally and going back to linguistic repertoire. So I'm guessing there are chicane performers and then African-American performers. Is there a different rate of usage of a southern draw? If the stereotypical or any sort? That could be anything. So that's just one example. Are there different rates of usage of ways of speaking or stylistic variation? 

Bryce: That's such a good question. I didn't necessarily look at the phonological makeup or even stylistic tendencies of each individual speaker so much as I was looking at the kinds of patterns of responses based on the questions that were offered them. But I think that it depends. So if we're talking about like for example, all of the African-American performers in the study were from Oklahoma and so had been raised there, not all of the chicane performers were from Oklahoma. So there were some from Puerto Rico, there were some from Texas and a couple of performers I talked to who were originally from Mexico, but who lived in Oklahoma. So their particular dialect or styles were of course influenced by what patterns of speech they had prior to being in Oklahoma. But I can say that things like y'all hun or honey and certainly the items of drag slang are all incorporated by all drag performers in Oklahoma. Like one queen in particular who I'm thinking of, she is from Puerto Rico, but she moved to New York and was living in Bushwick for a long time and then moved to Oklahoma. So she spent most of her life not in Oklahoma, but she is a readily able y'all user and uses y'all and honey and will use some of these southern lexical items that probably are in indexical of social comradery in this particular area, despite not having grown up with that. I don't know if that answers your question.

Meghan: No, absolutely. I am thinking about y'all. These kind of just like endearments, is that what they're called? But like hun, what do you think their usage is getting at? Why do you think there's this usage of these endearments?

Bryce: Well, I think it totally depends on context. So if a character or if a drag performer is doing a character or a persona that's trying to play on this southern hospitality, kindly older Oklahoman, usually it's because some perceptually drastically different voice is about to come up to create a contrast and a joke. But also, Bless Your Heart is a real classic Oklahoma insult. This is a way of telling someone they're being dumb. Bless your heart. So in context, calling like, oh honey, that term of endearment can actually mean something not so endearing depending on how it's used. So I think it depends on the context and there's so much back and forth between a drag performer and the audience whenever they're talking or they have the mic or even when they're just in conversation. But I would be wary of predicting even a trend there. If that makes sense.

Carrie: Also, I do that myself. I say, oh honey. 

Bryce: Yeah, exactly. You do.

Meghan: You do, you do do that.

Carrie: Oh, yeah. That part is not a Southern, the maybe hun would be or y'all.

Meghan: I'm thinking about sweetie or anything. I'm just thinking of like...

Carrie: Well, sweetie I think is maybe not southern. Florida for example, apparently, waiters and waitresses will call you sweetie. That is not a thing here for example.So I think like the way you use these terms, but I don't think I would say hun.

Bryce: Right. I think there's a phonetic possibility here too. Again, with some vowel fronting. So that's like honey. [inaudible]

Carrie: Yeah, I couldn't do that.

Bryce: That might carry a little bit more social weight or social meaning, a weight or social meaning, and depending on where it gets used to, that might feel decidedly more southern than just honey.

Carrie: Yes. What other vocabulary did you find this community and why was it interesting to you?

Bryce: Let's see. Actually, I have a list up here. Sorry, I should have all this memorized, but...

Carrie: No, that's okay.

Bryce: I can tell you that there are some things like work, which is great, and sleigh, these are... okay. No, I'll tell you a really fun one because people know about work and sleigh. Boots. Boots is apparently an intensifier. 

Carrie: Oh, what?

Bryce: Yes.

Meghan: Example, police.

Bryce: Okay. So if someone is dressed really nicely and they're fabulous, they can say, oh my gosh, glam, glam boots really glamorous, really glam. It's a phrasal intensifier is house down or the house down. So like, oh my gosh, she is like decked out the house down and you can combine them. So I have heard like, okay, she is slaying the house down boots, so it's just added on intensifiers. It's pretty crazy. It's cool.

Carrie: I love it.

Meghan: I love it so much.

Carrie: Never heard this at all.

Bryce: Yeah, anyone who listens to this who has spent time in drag communities will probably have heard at least one of them because I don't think that they're unique to Oklahoma, but the drag community uses them a lot. Boots is one that got mentioned a lot on the survey of drag slang, but it occurred a lot with the house down. So the house down boots is a really intensifying whatever comes before it, whatever qualitative thing that's there.

Carrie: How did it make that transition? I'm so curious.

Meghan: The house Down, like burn the house down?

Carrie: No, not that part. The boots.

Meghan: Oh, the boots. Yeah.

Bryce: Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about the etymology or the history of that, but I'll look into it.

Meghan: Please do.

Carrie: Report back.

Meghan: For some reason imagining that having the right shoes is important. Is it go back to just when you have a good look, is the shoes pulling them together? I don't know, I'm just like [inaudible] That's what the boots are referring to, like shoes, boots.

Bryce: Yeah. I think so. At least when respondents spelled it out for me it was B-O-O-T-S. So I assume, but also as someone who studied under Dennis Preston, I can hear him in my head telling me, be wary of folk etymologies.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly. For sure.

Meghan: No, it's true. That's what I was doing. But I really want to know. It's very interesting. But the house down is from burn the house down.

Bryce: I'm sure.

Meghan: Or bring the house down or whatever.

Bryce: Yeah, I'm sure that it comes from something like that. So it's just shortened. This is so X brings the house down or the house down.

Meghan: Yeah.

Carrie: So you brought up the kinship system and this is something that comes up in Paris is Burning as well. But can you describe the kinship system and why it's important to drag?

Bryce: Yeah, I think that there are far more qualified people than me who have just studied queer kinship systems and why it's important in given communities. But I'll give two major reasons that showed up just in the data that I had, which is the first is that, it's a mentor system. It usually looks like familial relationships. There's usually some kind of drag parent, drag mother or drag father or drag parent if they're a non-binary drag performer. Typically there's a one-to-one relationship with a drag child and that usually involves teaching how to put on makeup teaching how to get costumes together. For more successful drag parents, usually a little bit of a helping hand in getting them booked and getting them a spot in a show. Whether that be a newcomer show or a really low entry level in the park show or to some extent perhaps even being an amateur on a well-established stage that the drag parent can make all the difference in that.

But in a place like Oklahoma where coming out as queer or coming out as trans or coming out as non-binary, all of these things for lots of people can mean the loss of biological family or can mean strained relationships. I have more than a handful of times heard of how queer kinship systems became the thing that stopped a person from being homeless or stopped them from having nobody that it went from being a community of practice to being an actual family, like chosen family. So I am sure that Oklahoma is not alone in this. Again, Carrie mentioned that this is in Paris is Burning. You see that that's a major part of what drag mothers do in that particular documentary. I have in interviews in some of my work in Oklahoma, people talking explicitly about this. So queer kinship systems, particularly when it comes to drag, usually involve siblings who are about the same level of experience that they start. But you can have a drag sister or drag cousin or a drag auntie. There's a lot of play family in drag, again, almost certainly borrowed from African-American culture. So that you have people who might either be in the same drag family and have the same house name, which is usually treated like a last name. So if I was a part of... so Paige is a really big drag family across the US. It's not just in Oklahoma, but Texas, Oklahoma. There are some Paiges out east, but also in California. If I were a part of the Paige family, I might have a really close friend who I call my auntie because she's also a Paige, even though she might not ever have been my mentor, but I know that she is siblings with my drag mom or friends with my drag mom. So a lot of it is about connections and communities within communities and it can play a vital role in navigating what is very often a difficult place to thrive in or survive in for queer people in Oklahoma. But it also is a way of learning about the art of drag and in a capitalist sense also, a crucial part of networking and getting gigs.

Meghan: Right. Then it's also a vital part it seems in your use of drag slang.

Bryce: Yeah. Well, if it's doing all of this stuff socially or culturally, then naturally of course we can see some sociolinguistic patterns that are reflective of the goings on of society and culture within these groups. Absolutely, bitches as a discourse marker is just one of these that seems to be bearing out in the data.

Meghan: Yeah, that is very...

Carrie: So is there anything that we should have asked you that we didn't think to ask because we're just not part of this community at all?

Bryce: Well, I think one thing that probably is not maybe even new to you all or to people listening, but drag is a really wonderful kind of art and a kind of expression. I think that one of the things that's really great about it is that nothing's off the table to be made fun of. Irreverence is everything and poking fun at everything is how we actually take what feels like long-held realities and realize that a lot of the world around us is just Make Believe and that we can do, Make Believe all we want. If someone says that this is natural or this is what is supposed to be or what how we ought to be behaving, drag helps us to see that, oh, actually no, that's just your version of Make Believe. I can play my own version of Make Believe regardless of what gender I was assigned at birth, regardless of what gender I identify as, regardless of where I'm from, or my relationship to the place that I'm in. Drag is a really beautiful way of saying we're always playing Make Believe, and we get to make meaning out of what we care about. We get to put our values and factors into how we decide to live our lives. We get to decide that. I think drag is just a really, really cool way that we get to see that play out. Language is one of the crucial ways that we can actually study it and measure that.

Carrie: Oh, that's great.

Meghan: That's a beautiful way to end this. Not that I want to.

Bryce: Well, this is fun.

Meghan: We have to eventually, right?

Carrie: Yeah. That was really great.

Meghan: Yeah.

Bryce: Well, thank you guys. Those were such great questions and that was a really fun conversation to have.

Meghan: It was.

Carrie: Oh, well thank you so much for coming.

Bryce: Of course. 

Meghan: Thank you so much for educating us.

Carrie: Yes. 

Bryce: Oh, ditto. 

Carrie: We always leave our listeners with one final message. Don't be an asshole.

Meghan: Don't be an asshole.

Bryce: Don't be an asshole.

Meghan: Thank you again so much.

Bryce: Of course. Thank you you all.

[END]