TheoryDiaries: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Drag on Love, Liberation, and Literacy

📝 #TheoryDiaries: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Drag — Love, Liberation, and Literacy

📖 Who I’m Reading

✍️ What It Stirred in Me
What caught me most deeply across these texts and tributes was hooks’ unwavering insistence that love—not hate, not even critique—is the root of true transformation.

In drag, I see a living, glittering manifestation of that idea. It’s not just subversion—it’s celebration. Drag queens don’t simply perform gender; they radiate self-possession, care, survival, and joy. And when they read to children, they model love in public: love for literacy, love for difference, love as resistance.

hooks calls education a place of possibility. Drag, too, is a classroom.

🌍 Who/What I’m Thinking With (relating these sources to drag)

  • Teaching to Transgress gives a framework to understand drag as pedagogical—a transformative space where marginalized identities aren't just performed but empowered.

  • All About Love lets me see drag as rooted in radical self-love. Every act of styling, reading, dancing, and storytelling is a declaration: “I am worthy.”

  • Biana’s article reminds me that hooks' feminism must keep expanding. Just as hooks called out the exclusions of early feminism, we can now extend her theory to the drag stage and dressing room—sites of queer feminist pedagogy.

  • The two videos show hooks' presence as fierce and warm—qualities I also find in many drag artists who serve their communities through care, humor, and insight.

🪞 What I Saw in It
Just as Teaching to Transgress pushed feminism to include all women, it now invites us to see drag culture as a further site of trans-formation. It’s a stimulus for collective liberation—not an aside from theory, but its flamboyant cousin.

And All About Love resonates deeply in drag’s ethic of self-celebration. Drag queens aren’t hiding—they are showing up. They love themselves out loud, offering audiences a mirror and a possibility: you can too.

🌀 Tag: #TheoryDiaries #bellhooksWasHere #AllAboutLove #TeachingToTransgress #DragPedagogy #FeministPractice

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