Texas Christian University (TCU) offered a course in the spring semester of 2023 titled, “The Queer Art of Drag,” which requires students to develop a drag persona and “engage queer theories in relation to performance practice.”
The class, which is offered through its Women and Gender Studies Department and is taught by Nino Testa, whose drag persona goes by the name Maria von Clapp, will explore “drag performance as an outlet for social critique, pedagogy, and queer worldmaking,” according to the class syllabus. In addition, students will explore the history of the “queer art of drag,” meeting with drag performers and experts and create their own drag personas to debut at TCU’s Annual Night of Drag.
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“Gender revolutionary Leslie Feinberg begins the book Transgender Warriors by invoking the violent question asked of so many queer, trans, and non-binary people: “Are you a guy or a girl?” The gender binary is enforced through compulsory norms, harassment, and violence in service of a white-cis-heteropatriarchy,” the syllabus states. “In the epigraph to this syllabus, Feinberg encourages us to abandon the sterile and diagnostic attitudes toward gender that characterize dominant cultural logics: by asking us to consider gender not as category of being but as poetry, Feinberg opens up new ways for us to understand and experience ourselves and our worlds.”
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Every student in the class is required to “produce a one-to-two-minute solo drag performance to be recorded, edited, and shared with an open audience at TCU’s Annual Night of Drag on April 21.”
In the second week of classes, students will read texts like “The Gender Binary is a Tool of White Supremacy” by Kravitz Marshall and “How Drag Villains Became the Far Right’s Ultimate Villains” by Colleen Hamilton.
Other curriculum readings and videos include “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” by Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess, “Drag Kids” and “Queer Childhoods and Drag Race” by Mary Zaborskis.
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Students will also learn and watch about the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” which was at the center of blowback after the LA Dodgers’ honored the activist drag queen troupe at its annual pride night celebration.
