Making maricones into bitches: Multimodal, multi-lingual representation of reclaimed slurs in Drag Race España

Abstract

While the Drag Race television franchise continues to expand across linguistic and cultural contexts, some linguo-cultural specificities resist translation for the global audience. This paper critically analyzes the intertextual management of Drag Race España participants’ use of the reclaimed slur maricón. Following shocked reactions from Anglophone fans, the Season 1 translation (f*g) was abandoned, and instead, in Season 2, the utterance was frequently omitted in both English and Spanish subtitles and/or translated as bitch — a common utterance in Anglophone iterations of the show. We argue that this shift domesticates the language of the Spanish contestants, defanging the political potency of contestants’ reclamation of a slur targeting their own sexualities and camp femininities, and instead leaving discussions of reclamation orphaned, as their active illustration is replaced with a more broadly reclaimed term, which likely has not been used as a slur against the contestants and therefore lacks the same political force.