Amerikastudien / American Studies 69.4 (2024): 403-23 403 1 This research was funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): 10.55776/P35199. For open access purposes, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author- accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. This article is part of a wider research project, titled “Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900-1969,” which considers how queerphobic legislation has shaped the movement and cultural production of queer creatives. “This Wave Feels Like a Tsunami”: The Political Responses of RuPaul’s Drag Race to Anti-Drag Legislation in the United States 1 Ben Robbins Abstract This article will consider the ways in which season 15 of Drag Race has creatively responded to anti-drag legislation. References to current legal developments ap- peared throughout the season, such as in “werk room” scenes where the queens debunked myths about the role of drag in educational contexts, a teacher’s make- over challenge where they discuss the importance of having queer figures in the classroom or the season finale’s fundraising drive for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Drag Defense Fund. In these instances, the show consistently empha- sized the educative, communal, and universal aspects of drag. In this article, I will focus particularly on episode 12 of the season: “Wigloose: The Rusical!” This drag musical, a parody of 1984’s Footloose, is set in a small rural town that has closed down a “notorious” drag club the students had been running at the high school. The young students intervene in a council meeting, where they are planning to outlaw drag in the town, and their actions lead senior members of the community to reveal they all have past experiences of practicing drag. Such an emphasis on the universality of the art form presents drag queens as unthreatening to the ex- isting social order in ways that support assimilationist politics. Nevertheless, I show how individual performers can overcome Drag Race’s wider emphasis on non-threatening integrationist politics through performances that are more chal- lenging and demonstrate their “disidentification” from what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “majoritarian public sphere” (Disidentifications 4) or representatives of the hegemonic dominant culture. Keywords: anti-drag bills; television; education; parody; performativity Season 15 of the U.S. version of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality competi- tion TV show for drag queens, premiered on January 6 and ran until April 14, 2023, on MTV in the United States. e airing of this season took