Teaching is a Drag! Performing Gender as a Queer Secondary English Teacher

ABSTRACT

In light of recent protests at Drag Queen Story Hour events, this essay offers a critical examination of the role of gender performance in secondary schools and English lessons through a personal exploration of how I perform gender as a queer English teacher. I show that schools perpetuate a model of gender that is binary and heterosexist; that teachers and students perform gender in complex ways; that reading in English requires queer performances of gender; and that the professional is always personal when it comes to teacher development.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher identity
• teacher development
• queerness
• gender performance
• performativity
• English education
• reading
• drag
• Drag Queen Story Hour

Introduction

In February 2023, the art gallery Tate Britain in London hosted an event called Drag Queen Story Hour led by drag queen and children’s author Aida H Dee. A typical Drag Queen Story Hour sees a drag artist read and perform children’s books interactively to a young audience alongside their parents or carers, and, by the look and sound of things, they are joyful events filled to the brim with imagination, education and fabulosity. But not everyone seems to agree with me about this: outside Tate Britain, a crowd gathered in protest at the event, outraged by the prospect of Aida H Dee reading books to children, with some wielding signs that read ‘groom dogs not children’ and ‘no drag for kids’ (Kendall Adams 2023). Unsurprisingly, arguments against Drag Queen Story Hour tend to fall back on illogical and dangerous anti-queer tropes: that queer media is inherently over-sexual; that queer people are sexual predators; and that children should not be exposed to anything other than heteronormative representations of sex, gender and sexuality. The protest at Tate Britain was not an isolated incident either, as reports have increased in the UK and the USA over the last few years of protests at drag shows for younger audiences and violent threats against drag performers who have taken part in them (Empson 2023).

As a queer person and a secondary English teacher, I feel a lot of things about these protests: irritated at the lack of respect for drag as a form of art and social justice; disturbed by the recurring vilification of queer communities and cultures; but also perplexed by the idea that drag is suddenly an inappropriate form of entertainment for children and incompatible with education. From Ancient Greek theatre and Shakespeare’s plays¹ through to British pantomime and RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag has occupied a significant role in popular forms of storytelling throughout recorded history, many of which have been staples of English, Media and Drama curricula and extracurricular activities in schools across the world. Drag Queen Story Hour itself, as Keenan and Miss Hot Mess (2020) show, has much in common with formal early childhood education. Thinking back to my own time as a secondary school student, I can remember plenty of occasions in English and Drama lessons that called for exaggerated performances of gender for the purposes of both education and entertainment. Some standout memories include being persuaded by my English teacher into hot-seating in role as an egregiously camp Mr Birling during our study of An Inspector Calls, and being used as an exemplar by my Drama teacher in a gender-switching performance of John Godber’s Bouncers: ‘This is how you act like a woman getting ready for a night out, boys’, she told the rest of my group.

Much of my gender role-playing at school was done under the guise of comedy for friends, but it was also a tool for me to explore and make sense of my own queerness. It was not until I got to university that I came across any academic thought on gender and queerness. Encountering the works of queer theorists Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam on my English degree was a validating experience, for their arguments on the social construction of gender gave words and weight to a phenomenon that I had implicitly understood and utilised from early childhood. When I returned to the secondary education system a few years later as an English teacher, I did so with more confidence in my queer identity and a greater understanding of the significance of gender performance in the formal processes of teaching and learning.

The idea that gender is a socially constructed category, rather than a biological reality, is well established in the fields of poststructural feminism and queer studies (Butler 1990; Halberstam 1998; Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender is a doing, it is argued, not a being; a performance that actually creates identity rather than an essence of it. Gender identities are constructed through the ways in which people walk, talk, dress, behave and so on; and theorists have often turned to drag artists and transgender people in their analysis of gender performance as obvious examples of this phenomenon. Furthermore, Butler (1988, 1990, 1993, 2004) has famously developed the concept of gender performativity, which, briefly put, posits that gender is constructed through a set of corporeal acts that are thought to be in compliance with dominant societal norms. In other words, we are internally and externally pressured by society to perform gender in particular ways, with those discursively produced as men expected to perform masculinely and those discursively produced as women expected to perform femininely.

There has been some exploration into gender performance in educational contexts including in secondary schools. Significantly, Paechter (2006, 2007, 2012, 2019) and Francis (2008, 2010; Francis and Paechter 2015 with Paechter) have analysed performances of gender in both teachers and students, with their research highlighting the tensions between the ways in which gender is conceptualised in theory, is discursively produced within the education system, and is ultimately represented in educational research. They observe, for example, how little systematic research has been carried out on feminine boys and masculine girls in schools, and how the conflation of sex and gender in the education system leads to the mischaracterisation of gender performance. Research has also revealed the negative effects of heteronormativity on teacher identity development for queer people (Connell 2015; Henderson 2019; Woodfine and Warner 2023). As Connell (2015, 7) argues, ‘teachers are expected to perform a sexually neutral and gender-normative self in the classroom – and beyond’, which is not only damaging to a queer person’s sense of self but also contradicts the ethos of pride that queer people are increasingly encouraged to adopt in their personal lives.

This essay offers a critical examination of the role of gender performance in secondary schools and a personal exploration of how I perform gender as a queer English teacher. The first section establishes the prevalence of heteronormativity in schools by highlighting ways in which schools perpetuate gender as a binary and heterosexist category. The next section looks at doing teacher drag, which considers performative elements of teaching and how I navigate heteronormative codes to construct a gendered teaching persona. The final section examines the queerness of reading in English by looking how reading practices in English classrooms necessitate exaggerated performances of gender that bring into relief its socially constructed status. Through all of this, I aim to provide a defence of Drag Queen Story Hour as a legitimate form of entertainment, education and literacy for children; and to demonstrate the importance of professional development that attends to the cultures and identities of teachers’ outside selves, especially for queer people.

What follows is perhaps best characterised as an auto-ethnographic account. There is a long but under-appreciated tradition in English educational research of teachers writing autobiographically about their experiences in the classroom, and storytelling in this way has been regarded by many as a powerful form of educational research and professional development for English teachers (Doecke 2015; Yandell 1999, 2019). Miller (1995) argues for the particular importance of autobiography in educational research for female teachers who, despite making up the majority of the teaching workforce, have had their experiences and expertise marginalised in the institutionalised theorisation of education. Contemporaries of mine such as Johnstone (2021) and Philp (2019) have followed suit, writing with brilliant candour and particularity about their experiences of teaching as women in inner London classrooms. I want to extend Miller’s argument, then, to include other marginalised gender and sexual groups; queer people like myself, our stories and histories, have been ignored at best and outlawed at worst by the hetero-patriarchal matrix of educational research.

Furthermore, auto-ethnography has been posited as a theoretically queer method of research. As Adams and Holman Jones (2008, 19) insist, it ‘embraces fluidity, resists definitional and conceptual fixity, looks to self and structures as relational accomplishments, and takes seriously the need to create more liveable, equitable, and just ways of living’. My research does indeed embrace the fluidity of gender and resist a definitional and conceptual fixity of it; it does looks to the self of the teacher and the structure of the education system as relational accomplishments; and it does take seriously the need to create more equitable means of living by bringing attention to and scrutinising ways in which heteronormativity is reproduced within formal processes of schooling.

In the early stages of my research, I considered including more participants, namely other English teachers from my school, as there is always the risk that one person’s account of things can be dismissed in some research circles as anecdotal or considered an insufficient sample size. However I came to the conclusion that this would work against one of the main points of the task, which is to argue for the particularity of teacher identity and experience. My colleagues and I may all be subjects of the same heteronormative education system, but the ways in which we experience and perform gender as teachers varies incredibly according to our differences in social class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, abilities, interests and many other factors. To attempt to relate my experiences to theirs would only serve to dilute our individual stories and the queer vantage point of mine. On a similar note, my experiences cannot speak for every other queer teacher; they will no doubt have their own stories to tell that differ significantly from mine.

I collected the data for this research by keeping a journal, updating it regularly with written accounts of recent moments or resurfaced memories that felt in some way significant to my research.² The experiences that I write about in this essay are mostly drawn from two distinct parts of my life: being a student at a comprehensive secondary school in a working-class, Northern community from 2005 to 2010; and being an English teacher at a comprehensive secondary school in a socially diverse area of London from 2019 to present. In writing about my lived experiences, I am making no claim for their scientific objectivity; memories are, of course, a version of what happened, rendered into imperfect language and subject to narrativisation, bias and embellishment. The same could be said, however, about most data including that in educational research which disingenuously presents itself as empirical. Ultimately, the activity of a school and the people that comprise it are irreducibly complex, and there is no neutral way to research and report on it. And the longer I work as a teacher, the less certain I become about laying claim to truths in teaching and learning beyond my own perception of things.

Before we continue, it’s worth me providing some brief definitions for terms that I use throughout the essay. Firstly, I use the term drag to mean an exaggerated performance of femininity, masculinity or other forms of gender expression. It is mostly associated with drag queens who perform femininely and drag kings who perform masculinely, but drag as a practice is not limited to a binary model of gender nor arguably to a group of professionals; as drag superstar RuPaul (2014) sings, ‘We’re all born naked and the rest is drag’. Secondly, I use the terms boy/man/male and girl/woman/female as shorthand for people discursively produced by the education system and wider society as male and female respectively. Thirdly, I use the term heteronormativity to mean how heterosexuality and the gender binary are privileged in society and ingrained as the norm. Finally, I use the term queer in several ways: as a label for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender; as an antonym of heteronormativity; and as a verb for questioning societal norms, particularly around sex, gender and sexuality.

Heteronormativity in schools

When I told my fellow queer friends in 2018 that I would soon be starting to train as an English teacher, many of them were surprised, some even horrified. At that point, I had been working in the fashion industry for a few years, an industry that appears to act as a refuge of sorts for queer people, especially gay men. How could I possibly want to swap that safe space for the notoriously queer-phobic education sector? I could certainly see where they were coming from: their memories of school, like mine, were tainted by the anti-queer bigotry we had to endure from other students, teachers and the education system at large. Outside of English and Drama lessons, I was subjected to relentless interrogation about my sexuality due to my camp sense of humour, androgynous dress sense and interest in literature over sport – or, what we might call my queer sensibilities. My queer friends and I had come to see the secondary school as a site of queer repression, a breeding ground for heteronormative beliefs and behaviours. And what does it even mean to be a queer teacher? None of us remembered having one who was openly LGBTQ+ at school. So it may sound like my return to the classroom as a teacher was brought on by a strong case of Stockholm syndrome, but I was motivated to do so, amongst other reasons, by the opportunity to be the type of queer role model for students that me and my friends sorely lacked in school and to play a small part in challenging the heteronormativity of the system.

Heteronormativity has been and continues to be an inescapable reality of the British education system. Secondary schools in England are not only products of a heteronormative society but also co-producers of it, legitimatising and reiterating hegemonic discourses on sex, gender and sexuality. So what are some examples of heteronormativity in the policy and culture of secondary schooling? And how have I experienced them as a student and teacher? Much of what I go on to explain may seem obvious to anyone who has spent time in a British secondary school, but that is the point: heteronormativity is so taken for granted in schools, appearing as the most mundane of occurrences and the most benign of traditions, that it hardly figures as problematic in the minds of most people.

It took until halfway through my time in secondary school, after being in full-time education for nine years, for me to hear the word gay uttered in a formal educational context. The year was 2008 and I was in a Year 9 Science lesson partly on HIV. Following a very scientific explanation of the virus, my Science teacher went on to state that certain groups were more at risk of catching it including gay men. I remember him glancing lingeringly at me just after saying it, almost as if he was offering this information to me as a warning or a piece of advice. I had heard the words gay and queer said hundreds of times by other students, on the playground and in the corridors, thrown casually and viciously about as a pejorative term – but never until that point by a teacher in a classroom.

The blame for this queer erasure in schools, I would argue, lies mostly with two pieces of national legislation, both introduced in 1988: Section 28 and the national curriculum. Section 28 prohibited local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality by teaching or publishing material’ (Local Government Act 1988), reifying heteronormativity in the education system and ensuring that an entire generation of British schoolchildren, with me in the tail end, grew up without any formal education on queer lives and cultures. It had profound consequences on teachers and researchers too: for me to have even written and shared this essay just over twenty years would have threatened my employment as a teacher simply for engaging with queerness in an educational context. The abolition of the clause in 2003 changed very little in practice, as prejudice was baked in to the system by then. Even now, teachers and students still work under the shadow of it: research shows that LGBTQ+ teachers are still adversely affected by Section 28, with many of them viewing their teacher and queer identities as incompatible (Henderson 2019; Lee 2019). And the national curriculum, while not explicitly anti-queer, is guilty through neglect. Since its introduction, it has insisted upon the instruction of a homogenous curriculum predicated on heteronormative values, even since the abolition of Section 28. The current iteration of the national curriculum for English, for instance, features a negligible amount of explicitly queer characters and stories. Since starting to teach, the only text that I have encountered on the national curriculum with an openly queer character is Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey, which can be chosen as a GCSE text via select exam boards. It features a gay male character, Geoffrey, who is a dignified but pitiable figure. It is hardly the breadth and depth of representation that research suggests is necessary in school curricula to combat anti-queer bigotry and promote queer inclusion (Harris, Wilson-Daily, and Fuller 2021, 2022).

Other policies that perpetuate heteronormativity in schools include dress codes for students and teachers. The UK is one of very few countries in Western society in which it is the norm for students to wear a school uniform, and uniform policies here have been traditionally predicated on a binary model of gender: boys are expected to wear trousers and girls are expected to wear skirts.³ Most British schools take a tough stance on uniform: conformity is demanded from children down to the shade, shape and styling of their garments, with violators of a school’s uniform policy often punished or even excluded from learning. Teachers also face archaic gendered expectations about what they are expected to wear in school. A few years ago, for example, a senior leader at my school directed the Head of English to tell me that I needed to wear ‘a collar’ to work every day, by which they presumably meant a formal collared men’s shirt. It was a euphemistic way of saying that I needed to dress more consistently like a typical man does in a professional setting. I have never been a keen shirt-and-tie-wearer, but had only recently become more confident with dressing in a more ‘gender-neutral’ fashion in work. It came at no expense to my teaching ability – if anything, it probably made me a better teacher as I felt more comfortable in what I was wearing – though evidently to some it was a mark against my professionalism. Now, I do not want to demonise this school leader for their comment; I think they were just anxious about an impending visit from Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education), after the inspectorate criticised staff at our school in a previous inspection for dressing ‘too casually’ and not in a ‘business-like fashion’. Clearly my collarless neckline would be enough to put me and the school on the firing line for this again. What this does show, though, is how policy can be wielded, whether intentional or not, to curtail queerness in schools, and how these ideas can insidiously trickle down the ladder of school management and be reiterated by otherwise well-meaning leaders.⁴

Heteronormative traditions not only dictate how teachers have to dress in school, but also how they are addressed by others. In the vast majority of secondary schools, teachers are formally known to students by a gendered title of Miss, Mrs or Mr followed by their surname. This is often contracted by students to Miss for teachers who are discursively produced as female and Sir for teachers who are discursively produced as male. For example, I am known to my students as Mr Goodacre or Sir. So not only are teachers’ identities in work predicated on the gender binary, but also for women their marital status. Do children really need to acknowledge these things every time they wish to get our attention? Many put it down to being a traditional show of respect, but if that is the case, then it is worth questioning why exactly calling someone by their gendered marital title is considered respectful and why such a heteronormative tradition is maintained without much fuss. Another issue with this teacherly nomenclature is the lack of options for those who identify as something other than strictly male or female. I know several teachers who identify as non-binary and all of them have had to resign themselves to presenting in a binary fashion in school. As one of them put it: ‘Good luck trying to get students to call you Mx’. They were not necessarily blaming the students of intolerance; in my experience, the current generation of school-age children are generally more accepting of gender diversity than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Rather, I saw it as a criticism of the education system for not providing the structures that gender-queer people need, including simply the language, to accurately present themselves.

At almost every turn, teachers and students in secondary schools are systemically gendered in accordance with heteronormative values and aggressively so. Not only does this propagate in children a heterosexist, binary understanding of sex, gender and sexuality; but it also demands that gender is enacted by teachers in much the same way. For teachers who consistently think, behave or present outside of heteronormative codes, as is the case for many queer teachers like myself, working in a school requires putting on a performance of gender that often betrays and damages the selves we are outside of school.

Doing teacher drag

Having established some of the ways in which secondary schools reproduce heteronormativity through policy and culture, I want to move on to consider the implications of this on my personal and professional development as a queer English teacher. How have I navigated heteronormative codes to develop a gendered persona as a secondary English teacher? And how do I perform gender complexly in my teaching practice?

Bailey J Mills, a comedy drag queen from Manchester, recently posted a video meme on their social media channels with the caption: ‘POV [point of view]: your [sic] in English and your teacher has bangles on’ (Mills 2022). In the sketch, a camera is positioned on a desk from the perspective of a student as a female English teacher, played by Mills, approaches to ask if they need any help. Mills is wearing creased makeup, an unfitted grey wig, a tight turtleneck jumper, a patterned silk scarf and an excessive amount of bangles. The teacher starts out helpful but soon descends into slapstick as she begins bashing her bangles on the table and rapidly flicking through the pages of a textbook. In the swelling sea of teacher-related memes online, this video stuck out to me as I saw in Mills’s character – farcical behaviour aside, for the most part – a version of my own secondary English teachers. Comments left by other social media users demonstrated that I was not the only one who felt like this; it seems that many of us were taught English almost exclusively by theatrical, middle-aged, middle-class white women with cropped hair and a habit of over-accessorising. Perhaps the profession just attracts particular kinds of people, or perhaps slowly over time many teachers assimilate to this gendered stereotype of an English teacher. Either way, Mills’s skit spells out comically but clearly the performative nature of teaching and the exaggerated performances of gender that teachers put on which sometimes border on camp or even caricature.

Putting on a persona has usually come easily to me; after all, queer people are no strangers to playing a version of themselves, given that we are automatically cast by society as straight or cisgender and have to play along with it until we decide to come out. I thought that teaching would be no exception, but, with no personal blueprint for what it meant to be a queer teacher, I initially struggled to work out what was standard and necessary depersonalisation in teaching, and what was institutional suppression or internalised compromise of my queerness. I want to look again at two codes I discussed in the previous section, dress and form of address, and consider how I have navigated them in the development of my teaching persona.

When getting ready for work in the mornings, I sometimes think of the process as putting together a stage or even drag persona, as I put on what I have referred to as my teacher costume: a pastel-coloured shirt or brightly-coloured knitwear, wide-leg Dickies trousers, black Dr Martens boots, three small hooped silver earrings (one on the right ear and two on the left) and a staff lanyard pinned with a Progress Pride flag. It may not be as glamorous or extravagant as a typical drag queen’s attire of a wig, high heels and sequinned gown; but it is just as much of a gendered construct. This costume, so to speak, did not come together quickly or easily or even deliberately; rather, it was a gradual process of trial and error, of me trying out things that felt comfortable and authentic to wear; that were within the limits of the staff dress code; that enabled me to feel authentically seen by colleagues, students and parents. Reflecting now on how I dress for work, it seems to be a triangulation of three elements of my identity that I wish to present: the masculine silhouette is my general adherence to traditional codes of professionalism; the trousers and boots speak to my working-class roots; and the colour palette and accessories are nods to my queerness.

It is not until I have entered the school gates, however, that I feel fully in character, as that is when I become known as Mr Goodacre or Sir. In the very early stages of my career, it felt strange to be called Sir; given its dominant signification of masculinity and nobility, it did not sit well with my established sense of a queer, working-class identity. I did eventually get used to the title (did I have much of a choice in the matter anyway?) as I learned to interpret it as a sign of my authority in the classroom rather than my identity outside of it. Earlier I highlighted the problematic nature of teachers being known by their gendered titles and surnames, but arguably one affordance of this tradition is that it provides teachers with a symbolic separation between who we are in our personal life and who were are in our professional life. There is Lewis, my out-of-school self, then there is Mr Goodacre (inasmuch as these can be considered stable, singular identities). The latter is a version of Lewis, of myself, one that has fundamental connections to my other selves but is not quite the same person. Some aspects of Mr Goodacre are an exaggeration or enhancement of pre-existing elements of Lewis, such as my ability to wax lyrical about literature, which I can do much more lucidly when teaching. Other aspects are completely novel: I am notoriously impatient in my personal life, for instance, but in work I will happily give all the time that I have to help one of my students understand something. There are also aspects of Lewis that are ironed out for school, made more classroom-ready, like the way I instinctively soften my Liverpudlian accent for the unsophisticated ears of young Londoners.

These are not necessarily conscious choices nor ones that always feel within my control. Sometimes, when I am teaching, I find myself having an almost out-of-body experience, observing myself in role as a teacher and not quite believing that it is the same person as the one from outside of work. Other times, outside of school, I have found myself mysteriously unable to do things that come so naturally to me when I am teaching, such as confidently managing and instructing a large group of people. It seems to me that students are also aware of how teachers adopt a persona and can sense the tension that exists between teachers’ personal and professional identities. This comes across, I think, in the way that some students are fascinated with finding out teachers’ first names (‘We know it begins with “L”. Is it Liam? Luke? Lewis?’) or with seeing teachers doing ordinary things outside of school (‘Sir I saw you in Tesco on the weekend!’). Some of the more subversive students seem to regard these things as chinks in the armour, a way to undermine the authority of teachers by acknowledging that teaching and schooling is all just a bit of an act. As artificial as the divide is between our ‘real’ and teacher selves, though, it is perhaps just as easy to lose oneself (and one’s self) in a teaching persona. The immense workload of being a teacher and the dedication it requires to the school community means that some weeks I spend more time performing as Mr Goodacre than Lewis, and there are moments when I am unsure which version of me is the more authentic self.

What I have written so far seems to suggest that my teaching persona is a fixed identity with a static expression of gender, but this is far from the truth. As is the case with all teachers, I perform gender in different ways for different audiences and purposes, presenting masculinely and femininely to varying degrees depending on with whom I am interacting. I came to see this clearly in my own practice over the last academic year by comparing how I behaved with my Year 7 class and my Year 11 class, as at one point in the fortnightly school timetable I would teach these two classes consecutively. For context, the Year 7 class was made up of 27 eleven and twelve year-olds of mixed genders; while the Year 11 class was comprised of fourteen boys 15–16 years old, mostly working-class and of low prior-attainment.⁵ In my lessons with the Year 7s, I would present in ways that were more normatively feminine, such as speaking with a slightly higher-pitched voice and using more animated hand gestures and facial expressions. At the same time, though, how I typically occupied the space and managed students’ behaviour could be read as normatively masculine: I would deploy what some of the English teachers in my department call the ‘sergeant major’ act, which involves marching intently round the classroom and asserting instructions to ensure compliance. When teaching my Year 11s, on the other hand, I would present in ways that were more normatively masculine, such as talking with a slightly deeper-pitched voice, littering my speech with words like ‘mate’ and using less animated hand gestures and facial expressions. But then how I tended to occupy the space with this class and manage their behaviour could be interpreted as more normatively feminine: I would circulate the class gently, intervene with students by sitting down next them and working closely with them, and challenge any poor behaviour with disarming calmness and kindness.

I can only speculate as to why I performed gender in these ways with the two classes. With the Years 7s being young and excitable, perhaps I wanted to create an overall impression of me being approachable and playful; but the large class size and the behaviour of certain students meant that I had to run the room in a domineering fashion. The Year 11s, on the other hand, were older, moodier and more socialised in hegemonic discourses of masculinity; they cared more about the Tottenham and Arsenal football match on the weekend than the Montague and Capulet conflict in Romeo & Juliet (unless it involved a scene with guns from the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation). On some level, I must have felt that they would not listen to me or respect me if I did not read as masculine on the surface. At the same time, though, many of the students in that class were classed as vulnerable or disadvantaged, so I wanted to be as peaceable and nurturing as I could in my management and intervention with them.

So, stepping into role as a teacher requires transformation of our dress, names, speech, actions and other semiotic resources. These changes are an exaggeration of certain parts of our out-of-school selves and a suppression of other parts – so much so that there is an argument to made for teaching being a form of drag. It is by no means an otherwise straightforward performance of gender, though, but rather an intricate dance of masculinity, femininity and other gender expressions depending on the contexts of our lives outside of school and the circumstances in which we find ourselves in school.

The queerness of reading in English

So far I have argued that a heteronormative conception of gender is already and always prescribed in secondary schools; and that, as a result, being a teacher requires the development and ongoing performance of a gendered teaching persona. Building on this, I want to turn finally to the subject of English and look more closely at the role of gender performance in English lessons for teachers and students. Gender performance figures in many types of activities that are commonplace in English lessons including creative writing, analytical writing, drama and film; but for the sake of comparison with Drag Queen Story Hour, I want to focus on the activity of reading. How is gender performed in complicated ways when reading in English lessons? And how does the nature of reading in the English classroom call attention to the social construction of gender?

The social setup of a typical English classroom means that most reading is done by the class together and aloud, usually led by the teacher and supported by students (Yandell 2013). Despite traditions of literacy and reading being rooted in social and oral practices, the English classroom remains one of few places left in today’s society where reading is still done like this – and incidentally we can count Drag Queen Story Hour as one of the others. Whether reading independently or as a group, most readers find themselves stepping into the voice of a narrator or character in the text at hand. Reading aloud as part of a class, then, requires a very public (gendered) performance of a narrator or character. This soon becomes second nature to English teachers, who could be teaching up to seven lessons a day, each of them potentially with different classes all studying different texts. English teachers therefore spend their working days fleetingly but frequently inhabiting the imagined identities of a range of characters and narrators, their genders and all.

The number is even more impressive across an academic year after an English teacher has taught multiple texts to each of their classes. By way of example, in the last year alone I have read in role as the following characters amongst many others: Christopher, his father and Mrs Alexander from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Enaiatollah Akbari from In the Sea There Are Crocodiles; Okonkwo, Ezinma and Nwoye from Things Fall Apart; Hamlet, Claudius and Ophelia from Hamlet; Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and the witches from Macbeth; Victor, the creature and Elizabeth from Frankenstein; Blanche, Stanley and Stella from A Streetcar Named Desire; Offred from The Handmaid’s Tale; and various goddesses, gods, demigods and mortals from Greek mythology. Students, too, find themselves reading for a growing number of characters across a span of lessons, schemes of work and school years (and that is to say nothing about the gendered roles and characters they play beyond the English classroom). These characters make up a spectrum of gender identities that are intersected with and influenced by their class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, age and other factors. And, of course, it is up to the teacher and students, individually or collectively, to decide on how best to convey each character through speech and action.

Considering that teachers are already performing in their teaching persona, an English teacher leading a class reading is a nesting doll of identities: they are themselves playing a teacher playing a literary character. In one of my recent Year 12 lessons, for example, I was Lewis playing Mr Goodacre playing Blanche DuBois. This is further complicated by the need to oscillate between being the voice of a character in a story and the voice of the teacher in the classroom, so that we can explain things or ask questions or manage behaviour. Sometimes, somehow, we can be both voices at the same time, using aspects of a character to achieve the aims of the teacher. A recent lesson of mine with a Year 9 class demonstrates this well, I think. We had just started studying Hamlet and were looking at Act 1 Scene 2, the scene where King Claudius gives a speech to his courtiers explaining recent events in Denmark before having a strained conversation with his nephew-turned-stepson Prince Hamlet. The play was proving to be a tough sell to my Year 9s: they were already sceptical of anything Shakespeare and I had especially lost their trust after a disappointing reading of Things Fall Apart the previous half term in which things really did fall apart. As a result, I was determined to make our reading of Hamlet as smooth as possible and to breathe as much life into the script as I could.

When it came to reading the scene, I gave out some of the reading parts with intention: Claudius to myself, as I wanted his patronising manner and underhanded villainy to be clearly conveyed; and Hamlet to Ben, who was a fluent reader but easily distracted in lessons (Ben behaved generally unpleasantly towards teachers, and he was persuaded to take the part on account of Hamlet’s dislike for Claudius; he could play up to it, I told him). I provided a bit of context to the scene, about kings and courts in Shakespeare’s days, and suggested to the class that they imagine themselves as my courtiers. The scene opens with Claudius addressing the court, informing them of King Hamlet’s funeral, his marriage to Queen Gertrude and the growing conflict with Norway. There is always a campness to my readings, but here I hammed it up more than usual, speaking with pomposity, pacing confidently around the room, using my hand to shoo the air or clasp at my heart – quite literally a (drag) king holding court. I broke character now and again to gloss certain words (‘By green he means recent’) and ask questions (‘What is he saying about King Hamlet here?’), just enough times to know that they were following along with the story without, I hoped, ruining the flow of it.

We had reached the part where Hamlet speaks curtly with Claudius and Gertrude. The readers were performing well and the rest of the class were mostly keeping pace with the dense dialogue; expect, I noticed as I looked up in between Claudius’s lines, one student, Henry, who had given up on listening and was instead trying to distract his friend on the other side of the room. These two students were the type who could easily derail a reading activity if given the chance, and with it the rest of the lesson. Not wanting to ruin the rest of the class’s immersion in the scene, I carefully walked over to Henry and began to address my lines to him. ‘’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet’, I said, glancing between script and student, ‘To give these mourning duties to your father. But you must know … ’ (Shakespeare 2005, 19). In that moment, I was in two dialogues at once: one with Ben as Claudius and Hamlet, and one with Henry as teacher and student. The lines had become blurred between play and reality, characters and people. I leaned into the spirit of Claudius’s character, drawing on his power as a king to deliver the lines ‘’Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven’ (Shakespeare 2005, 21) to Henry with a disapproving tone and frown. Henry’s quiet defiance of me was not too unlike Hamlet’s of Claudius; my subtle reproach of Henry was not too unlike Claudius’s of Hamlet; mine and Henry’s conflict playing out so publicly in the classroom but so privately between us was not unlike the one between Claudius and Hamlet. Thankfully, soon enough, Henry returned to following along with the reading, and I redirected my attention to the rest of the class to finish the scene as Claudius.

It is not just English teachers who offer interesting performances of gender when they read in class, but students too. One student that comes to mind is Riley, from my Year 7 class that I mentioned earlier, particularly during our study of Philip Pullman’s (1990) play adaptation of Frankenstein. Riley had earned his reputation as class clown early on in the scheme of work owing to his caricatural performances in readings. His readings for the character of Frankenstein’s Monster, for example, usually involved him putting on a gruff voice and puffing his chest out, presumably as a means of conveying the creature’s scariness and strength. These performances seemed to have the primary purpose of entertaining his friends in the class, a group of mischievous boys, but it helped to engage them with texts better than any teaching strategy that I had up my sleeve. This time, Riley was desperate to read for the character of Elizabeth, and I took him up on his offer. (Sometimes, when a boy volunteers or is asked to read for a female character, there are smirks or jeers from other boys, as if it is a slight on the reader’s masculinity – but this never happened to Riley.)

The reading began in earnest, with me reading the stage directions to set the scene. When we got to Elizabeth’s lines, though, and it was Riley’s turn to read, he did so with an obnoxiously shrill voice. There was a predictable response from the class: most of the boys found it funny and most of the girls found it offensive. ‘Riley’, I said, ‘read in a normal voice please’. I knew that this was a clumsy way of phrasing it – what is normal? – but I was too focused on avoiding disruption to the lesson to reword it. Riley was defensive, however, adamant that this is how Elizabeth would sound in this moment – she was being attacked by a monster, after all. After a bit of back-and-forth about this, I partly conceded, telling him to tone it down at least or I would give the part to someone else. He did tone down the high-pitched voice, but soon found other means to convey his characterisation of Elizabeth as passive and helpless: ‘Victor – stop them! Stop them!’ (Pullman 1990, 42) he said with swooning hand gestures and ad-libbed cries. As the stage directions reveal that Elizabeth is strangled by the Monster, Riley placed his hands across his throat, convulsed in his chair, then flopped his body down lifelessly. As stereotypically gendered as Riley’s performance of Elizabeth was, I am reluctant to completely write it off as baseless and unwarranted: he seemed to be invoking the character archetype of a damsel-in-distress, which we had looked at in an earlier lesson on Gothic genre conventions, portraying Elizabeth as an hysterical and tragic Victorian woman lacking in agency. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but perhaps even having a laddish cisgender boy like Riley perform as Elizabeth in an exaggerated manner helped to convey the problematic nature of her characterisation, precisely through the sheer difference between his usual gender expression and the one he performed in role.

As these two accounts show, reading in the English classroom calls for complex performances of gender from both teachers and students. When reading we have to think critically about the presentation of gender in a text; measure the distance between our own gender identities and expressions and those of the characters we wish to represent; and draw on a range of semiotic resources to convey our desired meaning to others in the space. In doing so, the artifice of gender is laid bare and consequently made ripe for class discussion and negotiation. In this sense, then, there is something queer about reading in the English classroom: it can make strange the familiar, ignite questions about representation, and allow us to query real and imagined narratives on gender, identity and other social issues.

Conclusion

This essay has narrativised just some of my queer experiences of secondary school in order to provide a new perspective to ongoing debates about gender, education, queerness, reading and teacher identity – particularly those concerning Drag Queen Story Hour. We can draw two main conclusions from it, I think, that highlight the familiarity of Drag Queen Story Hour and the queerness of teaching English. Firstly, there are clear parallels between teachers and drag artists as educators: both are subjects of heteronormative systems that call for a gendered ventriloquism of the gendered self; both perform gender in ways that are complex and fluid; and, because of that, both have the agency to disrupt heterosexist, binary conceptions of gender. Secondly, meaningful similarities can be found between the typical English lesson and Drag Queen Story Hour: both are led by exaggeratedly gendered personas; both problematise the false dichotomy between education and entertainment; both use gender performance as a means of creating, enriching and challenging societal and literary narratives; and so both are fertile ground for critical queer thought.

There is also something to be said about the process of me as a teacher researching and writing an auto-ethnographic account like this one, as it has proven to be a necessary form of personal and professional development. It has given me an opportunity to take fragments of thoughts, feelings and experiences that could have been otherwise overlooked or lost amongst the hurly-burly of school life, and formalise them into a coherent narrative that makes sense of the relationship between my queerness and teacherness. Where else and how else in my personal or professional life would I have been able to reflect so deeply on these issues? I wrote the first iteration of this essay as part of a masters programme in English Education, throughout which I was encouraged to see teaching as a personally, socially and culturally located practice that calls for deep reflexivity; and I recognise that not every teacher is fortunate enough to have that kind of space and support. Now compare this form of professional development to the one that is compulsory for early career teachers in the UK (Department for Education [DfE] 2019), which offers essentialist conceptions of teachers and learners; generalised ‘solutions’ to teaching and learning regardless of contexts; and selective readings of cognitive science as evidence-based research. What is gravely missing from forms of teacher development like this, amongst other things, is an acknowledgement that our development as teachers is crucially and inescapably led by the identities and cultures that we occupy in our personal lives, however different or queer they may be in relation to hegemonic discourses. In short, the professional is always personal.

Teaching is certainly a drag, in many senses of the word. It is a drag on our physical, intellectual, social and emotional labour as we work tirelessly to educate young people and make sense of our interactions in the classroom. It is a drag on our safety and wellbeing as we continue to contend with a heteronormative education system that is still learning how to make queer lives liveable in schools. But, of course, it is also a drag in that it demands constant embodiment, disembodiment and re-embodiment of gender that, if drawn attention to in the right ways, has the potential to queer the familiar for adults and familiarise the queer for children.

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Notes on contributors

Lewis Goodacre

Lewis Goodacre is a secondary English teacher based in London. He recently completed an MA in English Education at UCL’s Institute of Education.

Notes

1. The idea that Shakespeare invented the word drag as an acronym for ‘dressed resembling a girl’ may well be an old apocryphal, but its endurance speaks to the significant amount of drag in Shakespeare’s plays and Early Modern theatre in general.

2. Teachers, students and schools referenced in this study have been anonymised.

3. It is worth pointing out here that the school where I teach is an outlier in this, as it has a gender-neutral dress code for students rather than a binary-gendered uniform policy. This is actually one of the reasons that I was initially drawn to working there, and I would probably now struggle to work at a school with a gendered uniform policy.

4. The good news is that, following complaints from staff members, the school dress code policy was amended to remove all references to gender.

5. A story for another time involves the occasion when a girl, a Ukrainian refugee, joined the class for one lesson after an administrative error with her timetable, and how the boys’ behaviour, including their performance of gender, changed dramatically in that lesson – and arguably for the better.