Sengoku Strider wrote:BIL wrote:I have to say, according to their own literature, it is child grooming:
I should warn you, you're saying this to a guy who pays his rent writing "citation needed" 18 times a day. I found the original article this quote is from:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 20.1864621
That would be the same article and URL cited in the
fortnight-old post I linked you, and subsequently AMB to. 
I trust you have read it in full? I also recommend
Cruising Utopia, cited in that same post, to appreciate the full fucking, sucking, fisting depth of the authors' ideological moorings.
There certainly are some WTF moments in that article, and stylistically it reminds me why I would probably hang myself if I had to spend a lifetime reading gender studies articles. But that quote isn't about giving Timmy a 6 year old mini-boner. The whole thing is mostly gender studies bromide about destabilizing prescriptive gender roles, to stop kids who can't fit themselves to them from self-stigmatizing and being stigmatized. The added argument for this approach being giving other kids a sense of familiarity with queer people rather than seeing them as perpetual others, one that just adding a mention of Harvey Milk to the curriculum wouldn't achieve.
Sure, I understand that. I don't see the leap from there to
"the hips on the drag queen go swish-swish-swish."
And in a larger project, to call into question the way that formalized education functions as an organ of the state to establish its ideological framework and funnel people into specific productive modes as adults. Which is a Pink Floyd-esque sentiment of social rebellion so musty your grandparents probably went through high school with some version of it.
My grandparents would've been barred from attending the same school as kids of my skin tone, were they living in the US rather than Jamaica. Actually, my mother probably would've been, too. Maybe I would've, even, depending on the viciousness of the local "one drop" ordnances.
The histrionic conflation of "queer survival" with the civil rights struggles of the past - including those for gay rights - is a little insulting. It's also spectacularly counterproductive.
BIL wrote:In reality, I don't think any sexuality - this is, by the authors' own admission, ultimately about sexuality - requires child involvement (not that it'd be any less grotesque, if it truly did)
The flip side to this argument is that these events are less about that than Disney movies ultimately are. Advocates will say that silencing queer voices just gives that type of dominant gender expression the entire voice in the educational public square in perpetuity. The perception that bringing up non-straight relationships to children is an inherently prurient act implying strange or dangerous sexual deviance in and of itself kind of proves their point.
The premise of heteronormative and "queer" norms as co-eminent, the latter unfairly marginalised, is pure wish-thinking. The margin is where it will always dwell, for nothing more sinister than shitty old biological reality. The word itself, "queer" (unusual, extraordinary, "I saw the queerest thing today") is a big hint.
A school isn't promoting dominant gender expression by reading
Dick and Jane, any more than people are promoting dominant ambulatory expression by gallivanting around on their fancy pairs of legs. That's the paradigm.
And again, it's not an aversion to any particular sexuality, no matter how heteronormative or "queer." It's an aversion to sexualising small children. That's the principle.
I don't see much principle in the proponents of DQSH where "black and brown" objections (often furious) are concerned. That suggests to me they are not operating from principle at all; merely selecting the paths of least resistance on their ideological mission. It's good strategy.
You know, here in England, they have a children's theatre tradition called "Pantomime," or simply panto. You may well be aware, particular as a Canadian. It's full of fruity characters, men in drag essentially. But nobody ever had a problem with it; because there's no sexual dimension, it's just silly fun.
The revisionist lens painting Widow Twankey, and Ursula, and Gaston as "queer icons yaaas kweeen" sounds more like wishful projection. Is Ursula a "butch femme?" Is Gaston a classic "domme top?" Sure, I guess, if you want them to be, through a sexualised, decidedly adult lens.
Even then, these cartoons were created by adults for children. You can't help leaving fingerprints and fibres. J.M. Barry is widely believed to have written
Peter Pan as paean to a lost gay lover. Lewis Carroll is an
absolute minefield unto himself.
None of this is reflected in the works themselves, because they were made for an audience of children. In the source fable, Sleeping Beauty's prince infamously rouses her from slumber via that old favourite, unsolicited penetration under assumption of consent. I must've watched the G-rated cut.
Of course the article mentions that these presentations aren't standardized or following any kind of official program, so caveat emptor I guess. Having been around enough grad school activist types, I am 100% certain there are people out there trying to tell kids that colonial patriarcho-cis hierarchies suppressing their natural foot fetish desires are the chains holding humankind back from eternal utopia.* But the pictures I've seen of these things all have parents present, so it's not like kids are being abducted en masse and Clockwork Oranged into becoming GG Allin.
*Actual conference presentation, though it didn't involve kids. Sadly but not sadly I don't think the individual ever succeeded in getting their paper published anywhere, I've looked online but never found it.
Bad parents exist. So do very busy ones, who put their trust in schools to not invite adult entertainers into the classroom for a self-proclaimed excercise in "queer worldmaking."
Air Master Burst wrote:BIL wrote:Taking DQSH at their word, they genuinely believe child outreach is their way forward. And yeah, that's going to go down like a lead dildo with 99% of parents. So would Exotic Dancer Story Hour, or any other vehicle for the sexualisation of children. It's an innately grotesque proposition.
This is exactly the sort of thing my parents would've taken me to if it had existed back in the day. I think you might be confusing drag queen story hour with children's beauty pageants. They don't dress the kids up at these things, you know, they only dress themselves up and read cute stories to the kids. It's fun!
Child beauty paegeants are pretty goddamn gross too, I have to say. It's not an uncommon opinion, outside of hyper-polarised political discourse.
The
Mignonnes/Cuties furore seems so long ago, now.
Not even three fucking years, seriously? Things appear to be accelerating. Or rather, extremists appear to be speeding merrily off into the distance.
Principle is a handy thing to have.
EDIT: Hey, more stuff I quoted in my post from two weeks ago :O
Sengoku Strider wrote:That Paper wrote:At many events, organizers invite kids to create their own drag name or study feminist icons using DQSH’s self-published Dragtivity Book (Erlich, 2018). A few cities have expanded programming to include bilingual readings, events geared specifically towards neurodivergent children and others with disabilities, or programmes for teenagers that feature makeup and performance workshops.
This thing was published in an academic journal on education (and not even an obscure one). It very much reads like it's preaching to the converted, in a place they expected only a few hundred people would ever even see it. I don't think they realized they were writing a list of cherry pickable quotes tailor-made for "how to radicalize your friends and neighbours against the enemies of our version of christendom" pamphlets.
Yeah, this is why I don't do cherry picking. Sadly, as demonstrated in this very post, people don't read even when exhorted to.
The paper is soaked through in ideological activism, with the sexualisation of small children as its vector. There's no need to cherry pick when the entire tree is so easily felled.
That Paper Again wrote:Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully “‘reading’ each other to filth” into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education.
I mean for
fuck's sake guys. Literally on page one? The one that's only ever half a page because of how much space the title takes up, so people might actually read it? You did that on purpose.
Ha, lmao, yeah, imagine reading things!
Ahem. Foot on this Koran I use to prop up my desk, I groaned "Fuck's sake, this isn't the time..." at what I assumed was a hararious, X-TREEEEEEM right deepfake of SNIFFIN JOE shambling to-and-fro, mumbling about chocolate chip ice cream.
)
Women are famously bad at killing not just other adults, but also themselves. Might've murdered a lot more people.
Apparently "thoughts and prayers" is no longer an insufferable enough spitball in the eye of people who actually care.
It's all fun and "gammon" games until then! 
Sick burn on those palefaces, Whitey! Now let's call that black motherfucker a Mars Bar, and that one over there a plate of converted rice 
Whitey? WTF, where'd that cracker-ass motherfucker go?)
), I used to think of camp as a cheerful break from the terminally up-their-own-ass genderspecials crowd. I'd often see those sorts railing against drag performers, as "cheapening their identity..." 
The whole fuckin point was to dress up and have fun!
)
I am the same IRL, outside of innocent earshot, ofc!