Drag Pedagogy: Performance-Based Queer Literacy

• In Event: Reading (to) the Children: Drag Pedagogy and Queer Performance at School

Abstract

In recent years, school districts have begun to initiate the development of LGBT-inclusive curriculum. While these efforts are driven by laudable intent, they often employ traditional, pedagogical approaches to learning that are grounded in standardization and easily packaged “best practices.” These emphases on efficiency and standardization arguably contradict the vibrant, complex, and undefinable world of queerness. Beyond critique, what would a different form of pedagogy look like?

Drag queens offer a queer vision of a “sage on a stage.” Drag queens, in many ways, have played an important role in leading queer communities for generations – drag performances have historically served as entertainment, political organizing, fundraising, and generative community provocation. More recently, queens have also made their way into the education of children through programs like Drag Queen Story Hour, Dragtivism, and Queens of the Castro.

In developing pedagogy inspired by queer culture, what might teachers learn from drag queens? In this paper, the two authors draw on practical experiences as a teacher and drag queen respectively to develop a theoretical/conceptual argument for drag as a pedagogical form of performance rooted in play, transformation, and alternative world-making. Then, we discuss how that maps onto childhood education.  Our argument seeks to move beyond traditional liberal logics of diversity and inclusion that often undergird LGBT-focused curricula and corporate- or state-sanctioned gender/sexuality trainings to consider how drag might offer open-ended pedagogical opportunities for children and adults to construct or make sense of their own identities, relationships, and political imaginaries.  Thinking beyond gender to some of the aesthetic and political modes that drag engages, we highlight four themes as a conceptual framework emerging across the literature to ground our conception of drag pedagogy: drag as 1) broadly disruptive and generatively destabilizing, 2) a complex assemblage of fantasy and reality, 3) a means of publicly addressing social stigma, and 4) a celebration of imperfection and failure.

We draw from these themes to argue that drag pedagogy embraces a kind of “camp” curriculum. Here, curriculum is an active process, a complicated conversation (Pinar, 2004) that seeks to unscript (Keenan, 2018) something about what children have come to expect about both gender and education. Camp, like gender, and like drag, defies definition. In Susan Sontag’s (1964) formative essay, she referred to camp as a “sensibility" that relies on a kind of unapologetic artifice, in the treatment of life as theater by “dethroning the serious” through the “proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve” (5). Still, camp is not only artifice, but as Philip Core describes, it is “the lie that tells the truth” (Core, 1999).

Combining this conceptual framework within the location of childhood education, we propose three key elements of drag pedagogy: embracing improvisation and unruliness, strategic defiance as a life skill, and rethinking empathy toward a political project of queerly making kin.

Authors

• Harper Benjamin Keenan, University of British Columbia

• Harris Kornstein, New York University