Drag and the Pedagogy of Silence: Performance and Gender in the Queer Student Movement

• In Event: When What We Know Is Not Enough: Questioning Silences in Educational History

Abstract

Jessica Clawson’s paper, “Drag and the Pedagogy of Silence: Performance and Gender in the Queer Student Movement,” will examine the use of drag and the importance of silence in the context of the struggle for queer student visibility at the University of Florida in the 1970s. The paper uses queer theory to discuss the relevance of drag to the history of education (Butler, 1990; Muñoz, 1999). The history of higher education and the history of student movements have largely omitted queer experiences. Yet queer people have long considered education of themselves and of straight people as crucial to the struggle to end their oppression. Drag performances are intersectional spaces wherein variations on queer interact within and between people, and wherein heterosexual people encounter queer identities in a setting they perceive to be entertaining. Drag gives them an education on queerness that is often deliberately pedagogical (Mayo, 2007; Kaminski, 2003).

An important aspect of drag’s relationship to queer student activism is silence. It is true that silence has worked on queer students as a form of oppression, but queer student activists also used silence as a tool. Drag provided a useful silence that worked on the straight students who entered the gay bar. When straight people entered queer spaces, they were in a power dynamic that is not exactly reversed (they were unlikely to face the threat of physical violence in the same way that queer people faced it in the world), but queered. They were meant to encounter queer cultures and identities without the power to heteronormatize them (Rupp, Taylor, and Gamson, 2004). In the face of a flamboyant drag queen, the heterosexual would be rendered silenced, not to speak unless spoken to.

Clawson’s presentation will show that the history of higher education can be married to the cultural history of queer liberation through the insights of queer theory (Graves, 2011). Student queer liberation efforts cannot be separated from the larger queer movement, nor isolated from other campus protest movements. Subversion of the heteronormative mainstream was important to queer liberation (Berkowitz and Belgrave, 2010). Drag is subversive because it reveals the extent to which gender is constructed, and this understanding can shed new light on the student queer liberation movement through demonstrating that queer college students were not merely gay kids trying to form a club (Butler, 1990). They were working to change their school and their community. Just as drag queers gender, so these students queered protest.

Author

• Jessica Clawson, University of Florida