https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 20.1864621
Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH)
Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, the authors discuss five interrelated elements of DQSH that offer early childhood educators a way into a sense of queer imagination: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly.
...In this article, we explore the pedagogical contributions of a programme called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) as a form of queer imagining in an early childhood context. Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully “‘reading’ each other to filth”1 into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?...
Conceptualizing Drag Pedagogy
We take the public interest in DQSH as a starting point to highlight the generative pedagogical work that drag may offer to children. Many elements of DQSH are common to early childhood schooling: bright colours, music, art, and imaginative play. There is an adult teacher leading a classroom of young students. What is different, though, is that the teacher is a drag queen. She breaks the limiting stereotype of a teacher: she is loud, extravagant, and playful. She encourages children to think for themselves and even to break the rules. She is the exponential product of Ms. Frizzle and Bob the Drag Queen. She is a queer teacher. To the unimaginative adult (which – sigh – describes most of us), it might seem that the world of drag and the world of children are impossibly distant from one another. Yet, their meeting has left many audiences wondering why they hadn’t considered it before. DQSH co-founder Juli Delgado Lopera notes this overlooked affinity in an interview: “I think generally queers are not mixed with kids—especially drag queens… It's a kid's world to be very imaginative” (Graff, 2016). Co-founder Michelle Tea also comments, “they’re both very funny and see the humor in the world… [and] for drag queens the idea is about pushing limits and pushing boundaries” (Rudi, 2018). Such generalizations may not always apply, but these comments lead us to ask: What if we took play, defiance, and imagination seriously as forms of knowledge production? If we celebrated the convergence of children and drag queens, what kinds of potentialities might their collaboration hold?
We write this article from the standpoint of an education scholar and former elementary educator (Harper Keenan) and a doctoral student in media studies who is a DQSH queen and organizer (Lil Miss Hot Mess). Given these positions, we make no effort to hide our bias: we are both supporters of this programme, and Lil Miss Hot Mess is involved in its leadership. Our purpose, then, is to make use of our unique positions as scholar-practitioners to highlight the pedagogical elements of DQSH that may not be immediately obvious to its audiences. Combined with our experiential knowledge of working with children and living in queer/trans communities where drag is often a celebrated tradition, we incorporate theories drawn from the academic fields of education, performance, and queer and trans studies to consider how drag queens and children might work together, however fleetingly, to promote a spirit of creative inquiry and world making.
We propose that DQSH offers a particular kind of queer framework – what we call drag pedagogy – for teaching and learning that extends beyond traditional approaches to LGBT curricular inclusion. The themes within drag pedagogy, applicable beyond the context of drag itself, move away from vocabulary lessons and the token inclusion of LGBT heroes to begin to engage deeper understandings of queer cultures and envision new modes of being together. We emphasize that drag pedagogy resists didactic instruction and is not prescriptive. Instead, it artfully invites children into building communities that are more hospitable to queer knowledge and experience...
