The Elephant in the Groom

I woke up early today and made a big mug of tea. Yorkshire Tea make a ‘tea and biscuit’ flavoured tea that I’m quite partial to.

I wish I had this mug as it appeals to my childish sense of play and humour

Drinking some weird tea - that’s my one and only contribution to being ‘queer’ today. But more on childishness and play later.

For some reason I can’t explain, at just past 6 in the morning and somewhat alt-functional, I decided to listen to James Lindsay’s recent podcast on The Queer Gnostic Cult explaining his thesis how Queer Theory isn’t just like a kind of gnostic cult, but actually IS one.

It’s quite heavy going, but very interesting and informative.

About 40 minutes in he talked about DQSH (Drag Queen Story Hour) and used some quotes from an academic work. I went looking for it.

The work in question is called Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood. And you can read the whole thing here.

The article is long on words and short on content. It’s the usual 98% pompous fluff with a 2% tidbit of useful information.

It’s basically an opinion piece (with copious references and jargon to make it all ghee-whizz academicky-like) and it has been published in an august journal of scholarship, no less. Presumably it has also been peer-reviewed.

Published in some academic rag AND peer-reviewed? Wow - gotta be right then?

Here are just a few snippets of some of the fluff :

In the second half of the article, we describe the kinds of knowledge that drag pedagogy can share with children (of all ages). We focus on five interrelated themes: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, camp and its relationship to stigma, and embodied kinship.

This framework, which counters dominant thinking about child development, is not directed towards a predetermined endpoint of growing up, but rather functions as an irregularized broadening of children’s own interests, abilities, and eccentricities on their own terms.

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

Instead, the sets of lines drawn across living minds and bodies intersect with the countless lines drawn across the living world by centuries of global imperialism and colonialism enabled by ideologies of white supremacy [citations removed]. To state it plainly, within the historical context of the USA and Western Europe, the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.

It’s a very tedious read. Big on claim, small (very small) on substance, and absolutely bereft of evidence.

Its main thesis can be summed up as : children play, drag is a form of play, putting the two together is good.

The argument is that Drag Queens can open the minds of kids by stimulating their imaginations in a way that ‘normal’ teachers just can’t.

Doesn’t it all sound so wonderfully liberating and fun for the kids?

Well, there are one, or two, or possibly many, elephants in the (g)room.

Let’s have a look what might lie beneath the fluffy stuff, and see whether there’s a more troublesome aspect.

The little tinkling of alarm bells begins in the abstract where the authors write :

Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education

I don’t fully understand the use of the word generative¹ here, but be that as it may, the intent is clear. For some reason, it's important to them that queer pedagogy is introduced early on to kids.

Is it more than just opening up their imagination? (oh, those boring strait-laced trad teachers, eh?)

Well, it seems to be a bit more than this. A little bit later on, in the abstract again, we read that

Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly

Is it important that children live “queerly”?

And, clearly, the use of the phrase “not simply” means that it’s also, but not entirely, about LGBT. But the LGB bit here is all about sexuality. Given that most young kids have little real idea about sex anyway, what is the purpose of introducing LGB notions at such an early age?

I get that we might want to make some kind of statement that being “different” is not a reason to hate someone or to discriminate against them - and a passing reference to the fact that some men choose to live with other men, and some women choose to live with other women - and that’s OK. But do we really need to be ‘teaching’ kids any more than this, at this stage?

And why does it need some bloke in a dress displaying an exaggerated kind of stylised faux ‘femininity’ to do this?

The agenda of the authors is made explicit :

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?

What in the name of the frilly pink knickers of Hugh Mungous-Knob the Third is meant by “queer ways of knowing”?

There are certainly different ways of understanding something, but different ways of knowing? Knowing what?

It’s just intellectual word games designed to make one sound, well, erm, knowledgeable.

But the real kicker here is the use of the word “being”. Why is it important for kids to be educated into queer ways of being?

The authors phrase things in terms of the potential of the interaction between Drag Queens and kids to generate new knowledge :

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?

What if we didn’t?

What if I put some Thai fish sauce into my mug of biscuit flavoured tea this morning? What potentialities might this collaboration of flavours hold?

They’re trying to sound like intrepid investigators into uncharted educational territory, but they just sound like clueless pillocks.

The fluff and propaganda and overall pillockish continues :

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.

At this point we’re only into the second section (of five) and you’ll be trying to gnaw your left kneecap off to escape the mind-numbing pretentiousness and tedium of it all.

Now that your left kneecap is gone - you can start on the right :

The harmful impacts of institutionalized gender normativity reverberate across the living world. Generations of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship within and across the fields of Black and Indigenous studies, queer/trans of colour critique, and disability studies illustrate how gender normativity works to maintain the larger structures that facilitate its production – coloniality and racial capitalism central among them

Generations of scholarship². Wow. That elevates it above the pseudo-intellectual pretentious fluff and bollocks it so obviously is.

This scholarship stuff is mighty wonderful magic.

I could go on - but by now you won’t be able to walk - and so I’d better start bringing things to a (merciful) conclusion.

In the conclusion, the authors explain an alternative meaning of the term family friendly.

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.

They’ve made explicit the hidden ‘code’ here, the secret knowledge (Gnosticism), that leads to enlightenment and awakening.

And try to read this phrase without major alarm bells going off

but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship

Alternative ‘modes’ of kinship? They said it for all to hear here - the kids are being prepped.

If you have the stomach for it (and more sets of knees than just two) you should read the full article. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating insight into what passes for ‘scholarship’ these days.

But at its core it’s describing a program of grooming - quite explicitly.

We ignore this elephant in the groom at our peril. It’s quite different from other elephants in the room.

1. I think they’re using it in the sense of generativity which, according to Wiki, was coined by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in 1950 to denote “a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation”.

2. In the fields of ‘grievance studies’ scholarship is a synonym for utterly worthless self-referential crap.