Here's the academic explanation for Drag Queen Story Hour and its purpose

Hey everyone, Libs of TikTok is back from her week-long suspension for hateful conduct, and does she have a video for us … watch until the end.

At a recent “all ages” drag show in a bar, the drag queen purchased dresses for a young boy so he can cross-dress. pic.twitter.com/wiLb7x45Co

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 3, 2022

Twitter user @ConceptualJames had tweeted a link to this academic paper back in June, but since he’s been permanently banned from Twitter, the tweet’s no longer there. Libs of TikTok has revived it, though: Here’s a paper co-written by a Canadian professor and a drag queen who goes by the name of Lil Miss Hot Mess called “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood.” It was published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry last year.

In case you were wondering what the purpose of drag for kids is, it’s to teach them to live queerly and introduce queer pedagogy. This was written by a drag queen. https://t.co/baeLNvB8jJ pic.twitter.com/vzfn0GcRJD

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 3, 2022

In case that gets cut off, here’s the abstract of the paper:

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.