DragQueen_Pedagogy.md 9.6 KB
Move away from vocabulary lessons and the token inclusion of LGBT heroes to begin to engage understanding of queer cultures and new modes of being altogether.
New modes we can envision together. Not just learn vocabulary and have LGBT heroes, but a deeper understanding by having a drag queen leading them to find their queer voice. So they can live queerly
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.
You can't tell people how it's going to go or how it's going to be, it has to be open ended and has to bef ree. You have to let things happen and break the rules with a man dressed as a woman presented in varying degrees of sexual expressiveness or seductiveness (sometimes toned down quite a bit to just a few suggestions of attractiveness). A man dressed as a sexualized woman talking to your children about sexuality on some level (whether it's just teaching the child that they can receive more attention by swishing their hips, to other more direct and overt use of innuendo to "read children to filth" (their own words))
Before we sashay into the world of drag queens and children, let's get a few things clear or queer. Firstly, "drag" is sometimes erroneously conflated with "trans".
They play off of this. They both attempt to get you to refer to drag queens by their opposite gender (both biologically and in the sense that many of these drag queens are heterosexual males), yet they are still happy to tell you that that isn't the case, after trying to play you on that very same dimension.
As a gender-queer performer scholar and a trans scholar (one of each), we were acutely aware and tired of this problem. It happens in both conervative and liberal discourses. This conflation has led to occasional tensions even within queer and trans communities. Thus we wish to be explicit: these terms rae not synonymous. However, drag and trans overlap, given that some drag artists are trans. While drag generally refers toa kind of consciously artistic performance intended for an audience in contrast trans people do not primarly seek to entertain (they seek to gratify themselves as vulnerable narcissists). Yet, there is historical slippage between these two categories, especially as language has evolved over the past century. Many of the leaders most celebrated within the early trans movement describe themselves as drag queens or street queens or transvestites. Including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson. One cannot meaningfully address trans history and struggle without engaging the history of drag.
For our purposes, s uffice it to say that the purpose of drag and otherwise refashioning gender long predate the current terminology used to describe human experience. We expect that readers can make sense of this complicated terrain (it's not complicated, it's bullshit). After all, at a drag show, this is not amateur night.
So, bring on your notes and put on those glasses, everybody, because this requires reading on multiple levels.
What they mean is that they're using coded language
Legacy of schooling and its role in teaching children about gender norms and other aspects of personhood. We offer a brief background on drag, not only int erms of its gender disruptions, but also its own vernacular pedagogies and community engagement.
In the second half of the article, we describe th ekinds of knowledge that drag pedagogy can share with children of all ages (3 and up?).
We focus on 5 interrelated themes:
- Play as praxis
- Aesthetic transformation
- Strategic defiance
- Camp and its relationship to stigma
- Embodied kinship
Ultimtaely, we suggest that drag pedagogy offfers one model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to live queerly. And we're living for it.
This is a curriculum journal. Curriculum Inquiry
Schooling children, scripting childhood.
They think that childhood innocence or regular schools is that we're scripting childhood and teaching children to follow a script of society. They aren't the groomers, you are. The whole society is grooming children. The system that exists are grooming children. The norms of society are grooming children to be normal, and they have to break through that with an objective of early childhood education. They want to "undo" the scripting or "consciously seize" the means of scripting childhood to redirect it in their direction.
Drag queens are going to re-script their childhood for them so they can live queerly.
The institution of public schooling was founded in part as a way of maintaining nation states. The whole system! (as opposd to global citizenry). Thus, th professional vision of educators is often shaped to reproduce the state's normative vision of its citizenry.
American schools might make American citizens. Oklahoman schools might make Oklahomans. That's the problem. A vision hidden inside of their ideal citizenry and the existing state grooms children to be ideal in the state of what the state wants. A prison that they're throwing people into.
In effect, schooling functions as a way to straighten the child into a kind of captive alignment with the current parameters of that vision.
A gnostic prison with the current paramters of that vision
Put differently, the design of schooling often serves as a kind of trellis (architectural structure to support climbing plants) that trains children away from social divergence in order to "grow up" to become adults who are viewed as socially and economically productive. (Marx?).
Schooling exists to groom children into being productive adults. Straightening them out (multiple levels).
In contrast, Cathering Bond Stockton suggests a metaphor of queer sideways growth that is possible for all children, regardless of gender/sex. This frameowrk which counters dominant thinking about childhood development is not directed toward a pre-determined endpoint of growing up, but rather functions as an irregularized broadening of childrens' own interests abilities and eccentricities on their own terms.
Maybe I have this mental disorder that I learned about on tik tok last week - let's encourage that is an eccentricity on their own terms. Cut your willy off. There's no pre-determined endpoint of growing up. They don't want people to grow up - keep them as mouldable and groomable children for their entire lives (because nation states already have a purpose of grooming children to be ideal, socially economically productive prisoners). Captive alignment within the curret paramters of that vision. We have to break them free on their own terms. An adult to a child says: hey don't you feel even more fun and better? Isn't it so silly and fun?. Read the Pier Piper
Here, it is important to differentiate between queer as an identity that individuals can claim for themselves and queer as an analytic (yeah right).
Many people, including both authors, use the word queer to describe ourselves. Although queerness refuses crystallized meaning, our use of the term in this article generally refers to our desire to practice an embodied political resistance to confining constructs of gender and sexuality as they are produced by the institutions and social relations that govern our lives.
Oh so that's what it is. That's what they want to bring to your children so they can live queerly
Our desire to practice an embodied (using their body) political resistance to confining contsructs of gender and sexuality, as they are produced by (not themselves but someone else trying to hold them down in a prison of their own creating). The institutions and social relations that govern our lives.
We don't call you queer. We call you groomers, because you are grooming.
As an analytic frame, however, Queer is not limited to the individual person. Queer theory can be used to examine how often impossible standards of normalcy can be formed. Not only through institutional categorizations of gender and sexuality, but also through social expectations produced through the racialized structures of capitalism that are inextricably intertwined with that hierarchy.
Often impossible standards of normalcy. If they're impossible, they're not fair or just. Convince someone who is vulnerable or miserable or sad and they can agree that the standards put on them were unfair from the outset, making things impossible and creating a cycle of vulnerability where you can tell them that the point (like Marx said in Philosophy of the Right) is to Throw Off the Conditions that Make You have to Cope (like as with religion).
Building in part from Queer Theory and Trans Studies, Queer and Trans pedagogy seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education.
Like Transformative SEL. And to destabilize them period. Like Hannah Dyer said, the point of queer education is not to create stable LGBT identities, but to make sure they stay fluid. Not stable identities, but destabilized identities that are continuously brought into a state of desire transformation.
This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into existing structurs of school and society.
*Not what you think. It's not just about Fun and it has nothing to do with Gay Acceptance, as they're saying quite clearly here. They don't want LGBT people to be assimilated and included into existing structures. They want people to be queer, politically orientation to disrupt normalcy. This is the same as where Freire said in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the goal of educating is to teach them that they're dependent but not to