In recent years, a programme for young children called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has risen to simultaneous popularity and controversy. This article, written collaboratively by an education scholar and a drag queen involved in organizing DQSH, contextualizes the programme within the landscape of gender in education as well as within the world of drag, and argues that Drag Queen Story Hour provides a generative extension of queer pedagogy into the world of early childhood education. Drawing on the work of Jos e Esteban Muñoz, the authors discuss five interrelated elements of DQSH that offer early childhood educators a way into a sense of queer imagination: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, the authors propose that "drag pedagogy" provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly. KEYWORDS Community-based learning; early childhood education; equity and inclusion; gender issues in education; queer pedagogy Drag queens have historically been relegated to the realm of the night. In the past few years, however, drag performers have made their way from the dimly lit bars of gayborhoods and into the fluorescent lights of libraries and classrooms. Drag superstar Nina West released a children's music album entitled Drag Is Magic in 2019, and multiple children's books about drag were published in 2020 (Bussell, 2020). These efforts build upon the foundational work of many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth organizations, like San Francisco's Queens of the Castro, which has explored drag with high-school students for the last decade (Hsu, 2016). In this article, we explore the pedagogical contributions of a programme called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) as a form of queer imagining in an early childhood context. Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully "'reading' each other to filth" 1 into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?
