Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH)

Drag Queen Usage

Source: Keenan, Harper, and “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” (2020) “Drag Pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood.” Curriculum Inquiry 50(5): 440–461.

In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of drag, and argues that Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education. 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” 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?

New Discourses Commentary

Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH; sometimes, Drag Queen Story Time) is an approach to education that involves introducing drag queens into classrooms, libraries, and other educational spaces with children (as young as Pre-K and kindergarten) to read stories, which are sometimes provocative, to them. The program began in San Francisco, California, in 2015. It’s originator is queer author Michelle Tea, who was at the time the outgoing Executive Director of the San Francisco literacy non-profit RADAR Productions. It was developed in conjunction with the incoming Executive Director Juli Delgado Lopera and Managing Director Virgie Tovar. It has since spread around the country and globe, proving a feature in perhaps two dozen cities by late 2019, and mainstreamed into virtually all districts in the United States and Canada, and many more globally, by mid-2022.

Drag Queen Story Hour is offered as an educational program to “connect [young children] to queer culture.” Following the educational structures of the day, it is presented as a “generative” approach to gender, sex, and sexuality education for children into “queer pedagogy,” a critical theory of education utilizing and teaching the contents and perspectives of Queer Theory. In that it is presented as a “generative” pedagogy, Drag Queen Story Hour situates itself within the broader Freirean approach to education that forms the basis for Critical Pedagogy.

To understand Drag Queen Story Hour, we must divert to understand drag and drag queens. Drag queens are, essentially as a rule, men dressed as women, usually presenting in highly sexualized ways, always exaggerated, engaging in a stylized performance type called “drag.” Drag performances have a number of characteristics, including being strongly performer-centered, intentionally hyperbolic, defiantly irreverent, and always at least gender-provocative if not overtly gender-bending or gender-subversive and frequently sexualized or overtly sexual in nature, all in a parodically self-aware manner. Its purpose is explicitly to subvert (through the politics of parody) the concepts of gender and gender roles, their linkage to sex, and their intrinsic connection to sexuality. Usually, drag is performed by adults for adults, often in the context of predominantly gay performance art meant to be both provocative and, often, humorous.

One objective of drag, connected to what Queer Theorist Judith Butler called “the politics of parody,” is to reveal both the performative nature of gender (because a man is performing as a hyperbolic caricature of a woman) and the underlying absurdity of that performance, even when not done through drag. Drag is therefore inherently subversive. This raises substantive questions about whether it is appropriate for children, aside from the sexual themes, who are passing through developmental psychological phases that are seeking concreteness of identity in order to have healthy identity formation. Queer Theorists are busily at work questioning the validity of childhood developmental psychology and attempting to rewrite it in terms of Queer Theory. Drag Queen Story Hour fits within this “queering” paradigm neatly. As trans education scholar Harper Keenan and Drag Queen Story Hour drag queen “Lil Miss Hot Mess” indicate in an article for the once-estimable education curriculum journal Curriculum Inquiry,

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.

Introducing drag performances to children as part of an intentional educational experience in school environments is therefore highly controversial, to say the least. The creators of Drag Queen Story Hour, including one “Lil Miss Hot Mess,” see this controversial provocation with children in spaces where it is normally deemed wholly inappropriate as a necessary component of the “generative” content approach of the program. The subversive character of DQSH, particularly with regard to identity development and formation, is also considered integral to the efficacy and purpose of the program. These views concur with the underlying “queer pedagogy” in which it places itself. In the view of Keenan and “Hot Mess,”

DQSH is organized differently than the usual classroom experience. The art of drag is defiant, playful, unruly. Drag is largely improvisational and relies on a performer’s practiced adaptation to an audience. There is an art to knowing when to wing it, to take a break from being a control queen, or to make room for a bit of chaos. Words or dance steps get forgotten, a song skips, a prop breaks – and audiences often talk back. Drag queens have little interest in such mechanical and dull ideas as “classroom management.” Classroom management, as a framework, relies on rules and procedures as a sort of factory model for quality control (Shalaby, 2017). It stifles creativity and aims towards order, marching towards a mirage of identical outcomes and efficient productivity. This reinforces what Foucault (1977) called the “carceral continuum,” which disproportionately funnels minoritized students towards prisons and other forms of confinement (Annamma et al., 2014; Love, 2016; Meiners, 2010).

As an art form, drag is all about bending and breaking the rules, and so its aims are totally different from a normative classroom. When a drag queen enters a (class)room, she generally intends to draw attention to herself – whether through shock, admiration, or envy of her embodied performance. There is a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred. In other words, what we refer to as strategic defiance is encouraged. What might strategic defiance look like in a classroom setting? How might teachers encourage children to talk back, rather than suppressing dissent? Arts education scholar Elliot Eisner (2002) wrote, “in the arts, judgements are made in the absence of rule” (p. 77). How can educators teach children how to skillfully question authority or break the rules?

They also describe the program this way, highlighting its role as a “generative” pedagogical approach,

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?

Understanding Drag Queen Story Hour as a “generative” provocation into queer Critical Pedagogy is central to understanding it overall. Thus, a “generative theme” needs to be understood for the kind of educational tool that it is to understand DQSH. The concept of generative themes as a pedagogical approach stems from the near universal adoption of the Marxified educational program of the Brazilian Marxist “educator” Paulo Freire. Freire taught that the best way to stimulate education—both genuine and, more importantly, political education—was through presenting the relevant course material (for him: literacy materials) through themes and concepts that are relevant to the learners and the contexts of their lives. The best such materials should generate interest through generating emotional and political engagement because of the particular relevance to the learners’ lives, usually including psychologically and emotionally. These themes are then packaged up by the educators and presented to the learners in ways that provide a political education (that is, Marxist programming) into the “concrete contexts” of the learners’ lives, thus allegedly inspiring them to want to learn the academic content being used as a mediating vehicle to the “political” lesson.

Generative themes are therefore, as a rule, provocative and politically relevant to the lives of the learners. In fact, they are supposed to illicit strong emotional reactions, which are taken as a sign of interest and engagement and thus likelihood to engage in further learning (such as, learning to read so that the learners can learn even more about how their political situation oppresses them). Knowingly or not by Freire, the generative-themes approach to education actually results in political radicalization into the political perspective of the facilitating educator, which for Freire is always either Marxist or a combination of postcolonialist and Marxist. Drag Queen Story Hour is provocative in that it elicits strong reactions from the students who go on to ask questions about issues of sex, gender, and sexuality, for example. As Keenan and “Hot Mess” write,

[D]rag aesthetics can provide an avenue into exploring children’s curiosities about social norms, which often reflect inconsistencies in what they have been taught. At many DQSH events, children ask genuine questions like “are you a boy or a girl?” or “why are you dressed like that?” often embarrassing their well-meaning parents or teachers. Although such questions can be hurtful in many non-drag contexts, DQSH creates a space in which performers can answer personally and honestly. In many cases, drag queens may not respond with answers, but with questions meant to complicate perceptions of gender and society: “why does it matter if I’m a boy or a girl?” or “why shouldn’t I wear sequins and feathers and lots of makeup?”

They use this inherently generative presence of the over-the-top drag queen in the classroom in stark contrast against that of the usual teacher to make the point that the mere presence of the drag queen catches children’s attention and makes their usual teacher (and, one could presume, parents) seem boring by comparison.

[A]s drag queen Nina West (2019) sang in her children’s album, “Drag is a vacation from a boring day/Use your own imagination/All you gotta do is close your eyes and see who you wanna be.” In the world of drag, you can wear a crown and glitter and bright yellow crinoline and makeup and neon green fishnets and a wig. Everything is dialled up, made more interesting in large part because it is extraordinary. The same book read by a “regular” teacher suddenly seems banal – when a drag queen reads a story, the technicolour has been turned on and the show has begun.

And they continue,

In other words, while verbal communication is a crucial element of DQSH, even if the queen said nothing, we argue that her mere aesthetic presence would be generative. While simultaneously destabilizing many of the mundane assumptions of gendered embodiment and of classroom life through the style, movement, and gesture, DQSH presents a queer relationship to educational experience. The traditional role of the teacher, transformed into a loud and sparkling queen, becomes delightfully excessive. She is less interested in focus, discipline, achievement, or objectives than playful self-expression. Her pedagogy is rooted in pleasure and creativity borne, in part, from letting go of control.

It bears pointing out that so far we have heard that Drag Queen Story Hour exists to be generative for the following purposes: (1) to lead children to “live queerly,” (2) to question sex and gender and their stability, (3) to break rules and want to break rules, (4) to see their usual teachers and school authority figures and potentially by extension their parents as boring by comparison to drag queens and “living queerly,” (5) to turn toward pleasure and desire, and (6) to let go of control, all in the presence of an adult man who thinks it is a good idea to dress and perform as a highly sexualized woman in the presence of children he hopes to influence. As we will see, we can add to this list (7) tempting them into “alternative modes of kinship” in the sense of the “queer ‘family’” one leaves their real family for and chooses “on the street.” (Calling this program “grooming,” it must be warned, will get you unceremoniously kicked off the largest social media platforms, by the way.)

At this point, it is legitimately a question as to why any adult would possibly consider Drag Queen Story Hour a good idea. DQSH surmounts this obvious challenge by selling itself deliberately as what it is not, both a necessary tool for increasing “LGBT empathy” and “family friendly.” Both of these designations are deliberate misdirections by the purveyors of Drag Queen Story Hour, who want to use it as a generative tool to lead (but not groom) young children into “queer culture” and “alternate modes of kinship” and desire. For example, Keenan and “Hot Mess” explain the selling point of “LGBT empathy” in the following way:

[I]t is often assumed that the primary pedagogical goal of queer education should be to increase empathy towards LGBT people. While this premise has some merit – and underlies many sincere projects in educational and cultural work, including DQSH – the notion of empathy has also been critiqued by feminist scholars of colour and others for the ways in which empathy can enable an affective appropriation of an individual’s unique experiences and reinforce hierarchies of power. … It is undeniable that DQSH participates in many of these tropes of empathy, from the marketing language the programme uses to its selection of books. Much of this is strategically done in order to justify its educational value. However, we suggest that drag supports scholars’ critiques of empathy, rather than reifying the concept: drag performers do not necessarily seek identification with an “other,” but rather to experience ways of embodying and expressing different aspects of themselves. … That is, drag is an imaginative and creative process. It is grounded in building character, both in the sense of constructing a persona and in better understanding one’s own relations to others. This approach can support students in finding the unique or queer aspects of themselves – rather than attempting to understand what it’s like to be LGBT.

Drag pedagogy brings a sense of queerness more robustly into the classroom, not merely by teaching about Harvey Milk or Sylvia Rivera, but through an embodied and affective process. … Rather than building empathy from a set of presumed straight or cisgender children, then, drag pedagogy might enact a mode of queer kinship that acknowledges that there is already queerness within the classroom. In turn, drag queen teachers have much to learn from interactions with children: many queens reflect that DQSH allows them to build relationships with young people that otherwise would not be possible. Some queens who faced homo- and transphobic mistreatment as children have said that DQSH has offered a kind of healing and hope.

In other words, Drag Queen Story Hour sells itself to unsuspecting and naive adults as a means to improve empathy, acceptance, and inclusion for LGBT kids, but it does so only as a strategic marketing maneuver. Its real purposes are otherwise. The same kind of “sashay” of meaning applies to marketing itself as “family friendly.” As it turns out, this selling point depends upon a queering of the word family, as Keenan and “Hot Mess” also make clear:

It may be that DQSH is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.

It bears repeating that it is strictly against all rules of propriety to refer to this activity as “grooming,” so do not do that. What they are doing with Drag Queen Story Hour is completely different than grooming. In their own words, it is, “leaving a trail of glitter that won’t ever come out of the carpet”:

We’re dressing up, we’re shaking our hips, and we’re finding our light – even in the fluorescents. We’re reading books while we read each other’s looks, and we’re leaving a trail of glitter that won’t ever come out of the carpet.

In summary, then, Drag Queen Story Hour is an approach to education designed around using the presence and performance of a drag queen in front of children as a generative pedagogy into Queer Theory, queer ways of being, and “living queerly.” It is deceptively marketed as “family friendly” and geared toward generating empathy for allegedly oppressed LGBT people, whom it apparently uses as human shields for a Queer Marxist gr–ming operation.

Revision date: 9/20/22

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