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Demonstrators derailed a meeting of Monash City Council on Wednesday demanding the cancellation of a sold-out drag storytime event at Oakleigh Library in south-east Melbourne.
This is just the latest in a string of children’s drag performances across Victoria that have been canceled or postponed in response to protests.
The central message of these campaigns (accompanied by varying levels of vitriol) is the same: “let our children be children”, “protect our children” and “hands off our children”, while at the same time encouraging artists and supporters of the events labeled as “pedophiles”. ”.
This is part of a global backlash. Similar protests and cancellations have taken place in New Zealandthe United Kingdom and the United States.
The argument in support of drag highlights the impact on the performers at the center of these events and the queer community, arguing that canceling these events is a form of discrimination and violation of human rights.
But the debate has so far ignored the freedom of choice and rights of the intended audience of the events: children and young people.
A protester from a group called Guardians of Divinity holds up a sign as people in support of the Drag Queen Story Hour event use umbrellas to block the entrance to the Jackson Heights Queens Public Library in New York, April 14, 2023.
Sarah Yenesel/EPA
Children as citizens
Calls to “protect the kids” from drag performers and transgender people assume that children do, in fact, need protection.
Such messages are rooted in Western societies’ tendency to reduce childhood to one idyllic innocencewhich positions children as “in need of protection” and increases their continued vulnerability.
Children’s vulnerability played a critical role in motivating the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.
Drag queen story hour supporters gather outside New York’s Jackson Heights Queens Public Library.
Sarah Yenesel/AP
Since the adoption of the charter, new laws and policies have been drafted in Australia to criminalize forced marriage, remove children from detention and amend the Family Law Act to better protect children’s rights.
The charter describes the need of children for protection and special care. But it also affirms children’s evolving capacity to assert their rights as cultural citizens and their need for freedom of thought and expression.
The power of dragging and imaginative play
Drag as a form of creative, physical and spiritual expression has existed within theater and cultural performance for millennia.
Drag and queer performance studies have led to a better understanding of gender as an everyday performance: from the clothes we choose, to the products we look for in supermarkets, to our repeated physical and vocal gestures.
Drag pokes fun at the gender binary, trying to blur the boundaries and expose the artificiality of gender roles.
While the success of television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race has made drag more accessible and relatable to a wide audience, the visibility of queerness that accompanies drag – especially if you move outside of designated queer spaces – is a clear step forward. far.
Kids enjoy story time.
Maria Altaffer/AP
Read more: Explainer: The difference between being transgender and dragging
But the way drag asks us to question the socially constructed nature of gender provides children with a vision of self-determination. You can do what you want to do, you can be who you want to be.
The potential within the play or drag harnesses the power of the imagination of today’s kids to envision a better future.
Philosopher David Harvey refers to moments of “free gameas fruitful ways to explore and express a wide range of ideas, to address power structures and social practices, and to envision new possibilities for how we structure and support community.
The insights of the child
In post-plebiscite Australia, the success of targeted campaigns against lingering themed events for children exposes certain conditions around what constitutes “acceptable” encounters of queer expression for children.
The all-too-familiar campaign messages swirling around the marriage debate — “protect the sanctity of marriage,” “protect families” — reemerge with only a slight rhetorical shift.
The more obvious difference now is that the messages are co-opted by extreme groups who target individuals and threaten violence.
The drag storytime event at the center of the protests at Monash City Council is still scheduled for May 19 at Oakleigh Library. At the time of writing, an online petition to cancel the event has 820 supporters, while another supporting the event has more than 3,300 signatures.
Perhaps, then, the social temperature toward drag performers isn’t as high as recent cancellations suggest. Instead, a minority of vocal and visible dissenters dictate the rights and freedoms of the majority.
A drag queen reads children’s stories during drag story hour in Saint John, Canada.
Shutterstock
The image of a transvestite in relation to a child provokes violent reactions in some because it is an image of progress and change and of queer acceptance and love against a long history of homophobia and transphobia in this country.
But there are two figures in this image and one is silent.
When debating rights and agency, it may be time to ask and be guided by the child’s insights.