DRAG MOTHERING AS PEDAGOGY: Redressing Actions for the Oppressed by Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos
My research (Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos) is focusing on how drag mothering in social performative practices can affect and be affected from the three operative domains mentioned below.
Queer compassion as an axiom
A family portrait with some members of the Drag House of Hopelezz and the Drag King House Løstbois, taken backstage at Theater Carré, as guests to Wende Snijders for the ‘Kaleidoscoop’ project. Photo by Stacey Yates, art direction Taka Taka, 2019
To what extent can drag mothering function as a social agent of care?
How can drag houses grow together towards a sex positive and gender free(er) present and future?
Since 2013 drag mothering has become a way of life for me. I created the genderless drag character Taka-Taka and started performing and organizing a weekly sex-positive queer party (BLUE) at the Amsterdam cruise nightclub, Church. Club Church serves as the headquarters for the two drag houses (House of Hopelezz and House of Løstbois) where I operate as an art director and drag mother. I have experienced being drag mothered from Jennifer Hopelezz within the specific realm of dragtivism that stands as an infrastructural proposition for underrepresented groups and their intersections. It is based on values such as collaboration, co-creation, free knowledge sharing, exchange of differentiations, friendship, dressing up and partying strategies for collective growth. Body(ies) hold stories within them: complex systems of encounters and affects. We form drag houses based on our lived experiences. Drag houses are not meant to represent a utopian future through social commentary, nor propose an alternative one. They do not institute a new reality, but the by-product of our drag houses, our culture, does.
Creative education as methodology
A moment captured at the workshop on drag character construction given by Takataka for teenagers at the Frans Hals Museum, 2024.
How can performance strategies learned from drag houses be applied to academic and art educational contexts and vice versa? And to what effect?
Institutional contexts are yet to assemble their own vernacular to understand the practice of drag mothering and the knowledge we create, including the new art/academic and subcultural roles/paths. One reason for this might be that, “minoritarian subjects need to interface with different subcultural fields to activate their own senses of self” (Munoz 1999, 5). The role of drag mother-educator will bring to the foreground experimentations in which new conditions; pedagogies; language; and curricula will contribute to the constant flux broadly described as creative education -academia - and underground (queer) life at large. I will craft new tools and dragging techniques for the urgent sensorial reorganization for those body(ies) that never had the chance to be and apply them to institutional context that have not yet been touched by these tools.
Advocacy as context
Taka Taka depicted with a visitor at the 25th International AIDS Conference at the International congress Munich center, where the character facilitated a space inviting passersby to contribute anecdotes on how we mother one another, 2024.
How do drag aesthetics of queering subjectivity through the negative commons HIV/AIDS challenge the notion of care in post-gay liberated societies today?
What are the tools of non-drag collectives for mothering in the HIV response?
Drag mothers have historically played an important role in the AIDS/HIV activism. My drag mothering practice for HIV response is a learning ground in care work. I have developed tools for my practice in relation to AIDS/HIV activism at House of Hopelezz and beyond, in close collaborations with the International Aids Society and Global Aids Village. So far, the experimental, self-organized, self-supported community lessons have been partly based on techniques from collectives, instrumentalizing creative processes for the current AIDS/HIV response.