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New publication out this week!Thrilled to share that my article co-authored with @LilMissHotMess, “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” has been published in Curriculum Inquiry. Link below, and here’s a quick
: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621
First, a bit of background. This article came out of 2 years of theorizing and writing with @LilMissHotMess, thinking together about what drag offers as a pedagogical encounter. I learned so much from her about drag history and cultural production.
In the article, we build from José Esteban Muñoz in an exploration of what Drag Queen Story Hour offers as an artful provocation beyond common approaches to LGBT education.
We propose that DQSH offers a particular kind of queer framework, which we call “drag pedagogy,” that provides opportunities to build from queer knowledge to imagine new ways of being together. We outline 5 key themes in this approach:
1: Play as Queer Praxis. Drag is firmly rooted in play as a site of queer pleasure, resistance, and self fashioning. It has no explicit purpose, but invites a kind of creative world building that we think is both urgent and exciting as an educational project.
2: Teaching Through Aesthetic Transformation. Throughout history, the “look” of a teacher has been heavily constrained by white patriarchy. We argue that the presence of drag artists in educational spaces delightfully & artfully challenges those constraints.
3: Strategic Defiance. This one is my fave. Drag is all about breaking accepted rules. When an audience member challenge a queen, she rarely resorts to punishment. Instead, a skilled queen often aims to form a sense of solidarity with a heckler. I love this approach!
4: Camp & Embracing Shame as Curriculum. Drag ultimately intends to reveal rather than deceive, often playing with matters made into individual shame in order to defang & destigmatize them. In an early childhood context, DQSH sometimes does this by reading “Everyone Poops”
5: Moving from Empathy to Embodied Kinship: In recent years, empathy has been the central focus of many common approaches to LGBT education. DQSH does something different by aiming toward a relational teaching practice that engages with queer art forms.
Of course, there’s lots more in the article, so check it out! Here is a link to a free copy if you don’t have institutional access (maxes out at 50 downloads): https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MTMPU7XNH4MC9MJCPIX3/full?target=10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621
If/when that link runs out, please email either of us and we can help you get past the velvet rope outside the Taylor & Francis club 
(which is to say, we’ll get it to you)
And check out the organization at http://www.dragqueenstoryhour.org & invite a queen to do a virtual reading at your local library! 
We could all use a little more sparkle in these times.
As an aside, we think this *might* be the first educational research article co-authored by a drag queen under her drag name! 
We think this article will be most useful for teacher education, elementary ed/ ECE, queer/trans studies, gender studies, and anti-oppressive ed. It also provides analysis on the educational value of @DQSHtweets that may be useful for queer/trans activists and advocates.
We are also looking for a popular press outlet like
@TeenVogue
or something similar where we can write a shorter version of this argument for a wider public audience. If you know an editor, please send them our way!
@TeenVogue
or something similar where we can write a shorter version of this argument for a wider public audience. If you know an editor, please send them our way!
