CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Punti, Clementine |
|---|---|
| Title | Performing Legitimacy, Teaching Defiance?: Swedish Drag and the Making of Queer Pedagogies |
| Summary | This thesis explores how Swedish drag collectives navigate the politics of legitimacy to develop pedagogical practices in public cultural spaces. Guided by the question of how narratives about drag as legitimate work and art shape queer pedagogical approaches in Swedish drag, I draw on a multi-sited ethnography of two drag collectives, Bland Drakar och Dragqueens (BD&DQ) and CULT, alongside interviews with three professionals from the public education sector, to investigate how pedagogy takes shape through affective, aesthetic, and relational practices in libraries, schools, festivals, and queer performance venues. Rather than offering a fixed definition of “drag pedagogy,” I analyze how pedagogical meaning emerges unevenly across institutional, spatial, and audience contexts. My research situates these practices within shifting struggles for recognition in a national context where queerness is expected to appear non-threatening and culturally valuable while remaining legible to dominant norms. By building upon and adapting the concepts of drag pedagogy, norm-critical pedagogy, and decolonial drag, I demonstrate how pedagogy manifests in performance and how it's shaped by the institutional and creative pressures impacting artists as they sustain and display their work. Even when not labeled as pedagogy, these practices generate forms of learning that challenge formal education’s emphasis on legibility and coherence. While BD&DQ aligns with institutional expectations through the language of literacy and inclusion, CULT engages affective discomfort and political excess to cultivate queer kinship. Both collectives, in different ways, reveal how pedagogy in Swedish drag is shaped by ongoing negotiation, where moments of refusal and compromise coexist within conditions that rarely offer stability. This thesis contributes to critical gender studies by foregrounding drag as a site of situated queer learning, where legitimacy must be continually performed and pedagogy becomes a terrain for navigating shifting conditions of recognition and cultural survival. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin; Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/punti_clementine.pdf |
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