Clear and Omnipresent Danger: Digital Age Culture Wars and Reactions to Drag Queen Story Hour across Diverse Subreddit Communities

Abstract

The culture wars, or battle between American conservatives and progressives to define national values, appeared to be in abeyance until they were seemingly reignited by Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rally cry. Yet, contemporary culture wars are different from those of previous decades because, instead of being driven by political and intellectual elites, they are often fought by populist voices on social media platforms. Additionally, whereas culture wars have traditionally been understood as reactionary to changes in local communities, social media may redefine community such that threats emerging in one geographic area reverberate across the country. In this study, we analyze 1658 comments posted to four ideologically divergent Reddit communities in response to Drag Queen Story Hour, which entails drag performers reading books to children in libraries. Our analysis demonstrates ways that different communities grapple with cultural threat, with those who have historically influenced American values exhibiting fear over the power they stand to lose. Additionally, in our analysis, members of online communities responded to threats that materialized in geographic communities to which they did not necessarily have a tangible connection. Thus, the diffuse nature of digital age culture wars may render distinctions between abstract and tangible threats obsolete.

Undoing cislingualism

“…University of Pennsylvania Across the United States, trans and nonbinary people are under attack. We see this in recent efforts to ban access to gender-affirming care for trans youth (Redfield et al, 2023), drag queen story hour (Davis & Kettrey, 2022), and the use of the term "Latinx" (Mir, 2023). We also see it in more everyday ways such as when people misgender trans and nonbinary people and engage in other forms of microaggressions that reproduce cisnormative ideologies (Truszczynski et al, 2022).…”

Drag story hour at public libraries: the reading child and the construction of fear and othering in Swedish cultural policy debate

“…In the context of condemning LGBTQ-communities, the radical right and right-wing extremistsprominently male environmentshave a long history of viewing nonheterosexuals as threats to the traditional (white) family (Daniels, 2009). The radical right position multi-culturalism and pluralism in direct opposition with peaceful co-existence in contemporary democratic societies, and sexual ambiguity as a threat to traditional family values (Davis and Kettrey, 2022;Rydgren, 2018). With the rise of the LGBTQ-movement and strengthened societal ambitions to safeguard minority rights, LGBTQ-issues become increasingly important for the radical right to push back against and to construct their collective identity around.…”

“…The view of plurality as something intrinsically good, and instrumentally beneficial to society, is central to common understandings of liberal democracy (see Mouffe, 2005). However, this very idea is what is presently challenged by the radical right and their notions of an illiberal democracy in which diversity and pluralism are believed to stand in direct opposition to peaceful co-existence, and where sexual ambiguity is perceived as threatening "our way of life" (Davis and Kettrey, 2022;Rydgren, 2018). Previous research shows that contemporary political conflicts and controversies pertaining to public libraries commonly arise in relation to this clash between contradictory and often ideologically polarized positions on what constitutes a good society, what threatens it and how it should be promoted.…”

“…This contradictory development exemplifies an increasing polarization between different positions in many western societies concerning identity politics, which ultimately manifests itself in the so-called “culture wars”. Davis and Kettrey (2022) describe how the term was established in the early 1990s, but social media has influenced how the conflicts play out. “Culture wars” often intensify during times of social, political, or economic changes (Davis and Kettrey, 2022, p. 27).…”

The dangerous use of genetic information

“…The third area of eugenics’ sway is the public sphere. Modern-day populists rail against, for example, what they term “critical race theory” in K-12 education (Morgan, 2022), drag story hour (Davis and Kettrey, 2022), “woke-ism” (Kanu, 2023) and the removal of confederate symbols (Forest and Johnson, 2019). Social media and the factionalized news and entertainment media facilitate reaching the target audience for these messages and bringing converts into the fold.…”