Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos

THIRD Fellow (Cohort 4), DAS Research

Research 

In drag subculture the kid chooses the mother. ‘Drag-mothering’ became a way of living for me based on values such as collaboration, free exchange, co-creation, knowledge sharing, friendship and partying strategies for social impact – DRAGTIVISM. It could be argued that drag stands as an activist proposition for underrepresented groups and their intersections. To mother drag-kids, I adapt principles against “banking education” mostly founded on the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ by Paulo Freire and Bell Hooks. I instrumentalize drag-mothering as a para-educational model of empowering drag-kids whose goal is a gender-subversive character transformation by tools such as make-up, masking, costume, dance and performative practices. Drag depends on entertainment-spectacle in order to give voice to its community in the public domain. Doing drag is interrelated with the statement of its sociopolitical position, thus the context where drag is performed defines its position. My research is focusing on how to harness the potentials of drag mothering as a catalyst and agent for art education by questioning engagement on social performative practices. How can the drag mothering knowledge be an encounter for other contexts? An encounter which can bring about modes of un/learning in a purely experimental way. An encounter implies a transformation in all the represented parties, this includes drag mothering knowledge as an entity in this aggregate.