Giochi di identità pseudiche. Celebrity impersonation e performatività drag fra corrispondenza e coerenza

This study is an attempt to operationalise pseudos as an analytical category for the study of drag performativity, testing it on the Snatch Game, the celebrity impersonation challenge of the tv show "RuPaul’s Drag Race". Recent studies on pseudos as a critical operator argue that its two epistemic regimes – falsehood as failure of referential correspondence and the non-true as intentional non-coincidence – can coexist within the same subject and text. In drag celebrity impersonation, pseudos constitutes the very performative mechanism of humour: while the selected persona is the archive providing the locutionary script, the drag pastiche functions as the illocutionary one to be inferred. Within a cognitive-stylistic framework, the paper accordingly addresses and (re)calibrates the General Theory of Verbal Humour to analyse three impersonations retrieved from the show, highlighting the emergence of satire both as a discursive product and a pseudo-genre.