Making <i>maricones</i> into <i>bitches</i>

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.