A Giant Mashed-Up Ball of Play Dough: A Conversation on Queer Play
Harris Kornstein and Harper Keenan
In 2018, following a Drag Story Hour (DSH) event that Harper organized and Harris hosted, we began a conversation that would unexpectedly lead to an article on “drag pedagogy” and further collaboration around queerness and play. In this conversation, we reflect on how our thinking on these subjects evolved, and where it is headed next.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Harper Keenan: Let’s start at the beginning: How did you start thinking about play? And what key moments, people, or literature pushed your thinking?
Harris Kornstein: For a long time, I avoided thinking about play. I suppose I was intuitively thinking about it, but hadn’t settled into that language. Coming up through media studies, I avoided thinking about it because most of the people talking about play were doing so through video games, which wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until I started working with Drag Story Hour, and working with you, that I started to overtly recognize the power of playfulness. And that allowed me to think about play in new ways in my other work: as a queer method or tactic in a range of arenas.
How about you?
Harper Keenan: That stirs up a lot for me in reflecting on our whole conversation over the last several years. When we initially connected, I was working on a dissertation about colonial history and education, and by nature of being queer and trans in the field of education, was becoming really aware of how little work there was, particularly on transness in education. And what work does exist is largely about how terrible schools are for trans people, how terrible the world is for trans people. It’s just like a litany of terrible stuff that is miserable to engage with. Between that and colonialism and education, it was a very depressing time.
And then you and I started this conversation about the beauty of Drag Story Hour and what it could offer to educators in thinking differently and more expansively—specifically, that Drag Story Hour embodies a lot of the ideas associated with queer pedagogy, but also complicates them in being more attendant to the materiality of gender in ways that queer theory and queer pedagogy aren’t always doing (not to be shady). I’d read about play and I’d read about queer pedagogy, and I feel like our conversations braided all this together in a way that both took me out of the hall of horrors of the world that I was in and into a really beautiful and quite practical space in thinking about: “what is a queer way of relating to children?”
Harris Kornstein: That makes me think about two things. First, a lot of what you’re saying about education is in many ways parallel to a lot of the discourses in digital media studies, and especially in privacy and surveillance studies. There’s so much discussion of what’s wrong, so much critique, but not necessarily action. And a lot of the action that does take place is either really dry policy, or very imaginative but impractical artistic or activist strategies for exposing the flaws of surveillance without addressing the material realities. And queer theory also often operates in a similar mode of critique without necessarily seeking a way out.
Second, for so long personally, I really wanted to keep drag separate from my academic work. Which is funny because, in so many ways, it was always present there. But I really wanted drag to be this joyful, playful practice, and I didn’t want the burden to overtheorize or colonize with all this academic thinking. But coming to this work together through the lens of play helped me see that I could playfully think about play. It’s kind of like that Christopher Isherwood line, “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously.” It’s about being able to find that simultaneous kernel of seriousness and levity.
Harper Keenan: I relate to what you are saying. I mean, I’m not a drag performer, but I have often wrestled with how education feels so antique. School can be where your queerness goes to die. I think of school as being really hostile to queer people and queer ways of being—that’s sort of what school is. And so, I have often oscillated between not wanting to talk about queerness and transness within the context of education, particularly schooling, because it’s going to result in folding myself in, in ways that I don’t want to do.
Harris Kornstein: I one-hundred-percent agree with you about the emptiness of queerness in schools, but, at the same time, this work has also helped me to think about the queerness that indeed already is present in schools. If I think back on my own experiences as a queer kid, in some ways I hated school. But I also loved it. I’m thinking about the materials of early childhood education: the glitter, the play dough, the craft supplies. Those are all incredibly queer. Even just the general space for kids to sometimes be weird can feel so queer as well. So yes, on the one hand, school is the space that often tries to squish that out of kids; but on the other, there can be so much flexibility and queerness that is there already.
Harper Keenan: I really appreciate that. And I think it’s no coincidence that so many recent hateful attacks on queerness and transness in schools have focused on early childhood education, because that is often the queerest space of them all. That is where the play dough is, where the glitter is. And kids want to play, and it is a form of resistance to the structures of schooling a lot of the time: the teacher’s trying to do what they’re supposed to do and the kids want to play. And there are moments, of course, where teachers participate in play too. I think the promise of our work is to say: “What if we actually leaned into play? What if we celebrated what kids are pushing us to do?”
We’ve started talking about this, but why do you think play is important?
Harris Kornstein: I’ll continue to lean into my personal experience: for me, one of the most important aspects of play is that it’s a different mode of engagement—not anti-intellectual per se, but it can help us get outside of our heads and more in touch with our bodies and emotions. It helps strip away a lot of norms, a lot of expectations about how we should be. Play gives us space to experiment and do things wrong—or to do things simply because they feel good or because we want to try something out. That’s the only way we actually change things, through improvisation and experimentation.
Harper Keenan: Yeah, I think of play as being a really undefinable space, and that’s part of what I really love about it. It feels undefinable, and a self-directed form of expression for kids and young people. They are not acting in the way that they’re being told to act by adults in their lives—they are engaging with each other free of active adult constraints. What I appreciate about Drag Story Hour, and the ways that I see queer adult educators consciously trying to engage kids, is that it’s about celebrating that beauty of self-directed experience and the practice of freedom, so to speak. Kids see that to become an adult doesn’t mean that you have to stop playing, or that you have to stop being playful and creative and curious and weird.
Kids are so wonderfully weird. And so much of how adulthood is constructed is through imposing this idea of what it means to be productive and normal and appropriate. And those are all the things that queerness resists. But kids are so queer: they say wild things, they do weird stuff with their bodies, it’s incredible. And I don’t want to essentialize children either. But I think they do really important cultural work that queer adults can both learn from and also share in a knowledge exchange with kids about. That is, what I hope for queer pedagogy is that it’s less a project of delivery, and more about playing together in solidarity with kids.
In what we’ve written about drag pedagogy, there is a sense that if a kid can’t sit in their chair, the way a teacher is typically guided to respond is to discipline and to say, “You have to stay in the chair, sit back down, or you’re going to be punished.” But I feel like a drag performer might say, “Why do we have these god-awful chairs anyway? They’re so uncomfortable. Let’s figure something else out! Let’s all sit in our chairs in a new way!”
Harris Kornstein: That also makes me think about my teaching. And this is something I struggle with a lot: how to put drag pedagogy into practice when I’m not in drag. I have the pleasure of teaching a class on play, which is really fun; but also, as much as I try to make it playful, I still can’t always get out of a lot of the norms of being a professor. But the times that I allow myself to, or I find those ways into really playing—even if it is just playing a simple game like closing our eyes and counting and seeing how far we can get—I learn so much more about my students and we relate to each other in such novel ways. It’s not just that those are the most fun times, but also some of the most profound moments of learning together.
Harper Keenan: I hear you talking about learning as a pleasurable experience, and I think so often learning is associated with struggle. Like when people say, “Oh, I’m going to grad school, it’s going to be miserable.” But how cool would it be if we could reorient to the pleasures of learning with other people and learning about other people and being with other people?
I guess that’s a good segue into thinking about what the future of play is, both in our own independent scholarship and in what we’re doing together?
Harris Kornstein: I am currently thinking through play as a political tactic. Especially in this intensified moment of backlash against Drag Story Hour and drag performers in general, I often say: the answer is more drag. That is, drag already offers many of the tools we need, and we need to figure out how best to use them.
So I’m connecting an ongoing project on how drag performers mess with social media platforms to protect their privacy with this moment of increased digital and in-person harassment. How can we playfully counteract these very real threats? With Drag Story Hour, we’ve seen different chapters do things like raise money by collecting pledges for every hateful comment on a social media post, or for every protestor that shows up to an event, or for every minute that a protest goes on. These actions are ways of playfully saying, “you can’t steal our joy,” but also, “we’re going to gamify these protests, and everything the haters do is only going to make us stronger.”
And I don’t think these are new tactics: the campiness of them have been part of the drag bag for a long time (look to the activist antics of Jose Sarria!), and it’s just finding new ways to use them in our current moment. There’s a lot more we can think about: How do we deploy humor? How do we engage sassiness? How do we embody a “pay it no mind” attitude? And also: How do we convince the people in suits, whether they’re principals or politicians, that can actually be a way to win? That maybe the policy arguments aren’t the only strategy, but a playful attitude is not only valuable, but necessary?
Harper Keenan: I think that’s such an important reminder. In this political moment, we are seeing people become really afraid and doing things like canceling story hours and ‘straightening up’ and presenting queerness as more palatable. We’ve seen this happen historically over and over again, saying things like, “It’s not that bad, we’re not doing anything all that transgressive: we’re just reading a book about penguins.” But what I’m hearing you say is the resistance, the transgression, the sassiness—that’s the point, we need more of it.
It reveals that it’s a really important political practice to be engaged in: the pleasurable queer art of play. It potentially changes the way that children think about what it means to become an adult that’s very threatening to a lot of normative right-wing ideals that are focused on becoming a very strictly disciplined person that works in service of the state that they want.
That is what’s so exciting about getting a bunch of drag performers out, confronting people in the street, and saying, “we will be in public, and it’s beautiful, and don’t you wish you were part of it?… And you could be.” And so, in terms of thinking about what happens next, I don’t want to soften what drag is or what queerness is. I think that is a mistake that has been made over and over again. And it’s part of why we are in the political situation we’re in. And I hope that this time we can do a better job of resisting that.
Harris Kornstein: Yes, and in the work that we’re doing together now, we’re starting to conceive of “queer play” as… I don’t want to say a field, but maybe as some kind of a giant mashed-up ball of play dough? That is, it has some definition, but also maybe resists definition as well — and can hold a sense of both malleability and multiplicity. It’s exciting how many different disciplines, areas of work, and real-world applications queer play really could—and already does—intersect with. And hopefully how it can help catalyze new norms in academia, where we don’t just give conference papers but also facilitate real-life playful experiences too.
Harper Keenan: Yeah, I love that. And in thinking about our collective journey with drag pedagogy, I am called to question: who would I be if I were who I actually wanted to be and I did what I wanted to do, instead of what I should do and what other people want me to be? Because I really felt this sense of unboundedness in working on our article together. And ironically, that was basically a side project for both of us, and will likely remain the most widely-read publication for both of us (thanks, in part, to our haters!). I was a grad student while we were working on it for most of the time, and I didn’t know if I was going to get a job.
Harris Kornstein: Same and same.
Harper Keenan: So my attitude was: let me just do this for fun, this feels fun. It wasn’t something I was required to do; I was doing it because I wanted to. And that was a new conceptual space for me that felt like an intellectual playground. And even in writing it in the way that we did, with a lot of flourishes and playful language, it gave me a real sense of freedom that I continue to chase. I felt really free in that kind of writing in a way that I haven’t always felt in academia.
And so, in thinking about emerging scholars, I want to ask them the questions: Who would you be and what would you do if you took the “should” out? What are the boxes that are corralling you in, and how can you free yourself from them for at least a little while? How can you be playful in your work?
Harris Kornstein: Yes! And when do we need to stop working, even playfully, and start playing for our own joy?