The essay “Drag Pedagogy” identifies five elements of Drag Queen Story Hour that bring queer imagination to students: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Teaching in undergraduate religion classrooms should take the lessons of drag pedagogy and become places of active inclusivity and discovery for all.
This roundtable will be conducted in two parts. First, instructors who have developed classes which present topics in both religion and gender/sexuality will discuss their various approaches and considerations, as well as the lessons they’ve learned over years of queerly shaping their teaching practices. Second, a group of trans, nonbinary, and otherwise gender-nonconforming undergraduates will share their experiences with this instruction, speaking on how the material in these classes introduced them to liberative possibilities of religious texts and practice, as well as how they used sacred texts to explore their own identities and interactions with the world.