Shifting Grounds Seminar: Lil Miss Hot Mess and Harper B. Keenan

Queer Play (And Its Haters)

In this presentation, we begin by recounting the unexpected response to our work on drag pedagogy, including both its celebration and the political backlash. Drawing in part from our experiences with the publication of that article, we offer a work-in-progress manifesto proposing queer play as a strategic orientation—as well as set of imaginative, intellectual, and embodied tactics—toward enacting more just and joyful realities across a range of cultural and political contexts.

Queerness and play share many conceptual affinities, particularly in facilitating creative, non-normative, and otherwise outside-the-box approaches to ways of thinking and interacting. Following scholars in both queer (e.g., Rubin 1984, Cohen 1997, Muñoz 2009, Ahmed 2006) and play studies (e.g., Huizinga 1955, Caillois 1958, Flanagan 2009, Trammell 2023), we conceive of queer play in expansive ways. By “queer” we are less focused on LGBTQ+ people or topics, and instead emphasize queer ways of being, knowing, and relating. By “play,” we intentionally imagine a capacious range of activities, from traditional “games” to what game scholars Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003) describe as activities of “being playful.”

Yet, many historic and contemporary sites of LGBTQ+ struggle and study distance themselves from overtly playful practices in favor of mainstream modes of respectability and policy. Still, queer play is already mischieviously present in many dominant and disciplining institutions—from schooling to social media platforms—in ways that people misuse (Ahmed 2019), obfuscate (Brunton and Nissenbaum 2016), or otherwise “[embrace] the powerful act of playing the ‘wrong’ way” (Ruberg 2019, 18). 

Drawing on communication and education studies (including our own work on drag pedagogy and digital cultures: Kornstein 2019; Keenan and Hot Mess 2020), we offer a broad conceptualization of queer play as an alternative worldmaking strategy—for pedagogical practice, research, and political action.  In so doing, we complicate several tensions in both queerness and play, including: discourses of childishness, utility and uselessness, as well as risk and danger; topics that are “off limits;” and the overemphasis on both games and on affects of joy. We share examples of figures (e.g., Taylor Mac, Tom of Finland, The Muppets), scenes/sites (e.g., play parties, dollhouses, imaginary museums), and potential tools/toys of queer play (e.g., queer slang, tarot cards, glitter) that demonstrate queer play already in action. We conclude by offering proposals (and demands) for what queer play might look and feel like, focusing on themes of relationality, aesthetics, and sensation.

Marta Padovan-Özdemir (chair and discussant)
Associate professor, Roskilde University, Denmark is one of the pioneering researchers of norm critique in Denmark. One of her latest publications exhibits the utopian engines as well as the modernist ghosts haunting norm critique. She has also contributed an entry on norm critique to The Concise Routledge Encyclopaedia of New Concepts for Interculturality edited by F. Dervin, H. R'boul, & N. Chen, Routledge.

Lil Miss Hot Mess (presenter)
Lil Miss Hot Mess is the author of the children's books Make Your Own Rainbow: A Drag Queen's Guide to Color, If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It, and The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. She serves as the board president of Drag Story Hour, co-founded the #MyNameIs Campaign that challenged social media "real names" policies, and has appeared on world-class stages like SFMOMA and Saturday Night Live. When not twirling, she is an assistant professor of public humanities and media studies, and has published in academic journals like Curriculum Inquiry as well as media outlets like HuffPost, Slate, and Wired. Follow her on social media @LilMissHotMess, and learn more at lilmisshotmess.com.

Harper B. Keenan (presenter)
Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Education. Dr. Keenan’s scholarship examines how adults and children relate to each other within the structures of schooling and other educational contexts. He is particularly interested in the management – or scripting – of childhood in public life, and ways that educators and their students can work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different. He has published in journals like Educational Researcher, the Harvard Educational Review, and Teachers College Record, and his work has been featured in a variety of media, ranging from NBC National News to Teen Vogue.