Call for Abstracts - Essays on Teaching and Learning Under Attack with RuPaul’s Drag Race

Coming off their award-winning success with the first volume of RuPedagogies of Realness, CTL Executive Director, Dr. Tommy Mayberry, is back, back, back again with their co-editor Lindsay Bryde (Empire State University) for a follow-up “shequel” edition with McFarland. This time around, they are focusing specifically on social, racial, and health justice to write against and combat the rapidly increasing global hate, misinformation, and transphobia and dragphobia, all on its own and as it intersects with the contemporary attacks on rights, freedoms, bodies, and on education around the world.

Check out the full Call for Abstracts and timeline below - and consider proposing a chapter yourself and/or sharing the CfA and boosting the signal widely across your networks, fanbases, listservs, etc.!

#TheVixenWasRight

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Call for Abstracts - Edited Volume

RuPedagogies of Realness 2: The Shequel!
Essays on Teaching and Learning Under Attack with RuPaul’s Drag Race
_{Eds. Lindsay Bryde (Empire State University) and Tommy Mayberry (University of Alberta)}

To say that a lot has happened in the Drag Race multiverse since we completed our manuscript for RuPedagogies of Realness (published February 2022, but completed August 2020) would be an understatement. Look over there! Canada’s Drag Race just crowned their third winner; RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under just finished its second season; RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 7 has come and gone with the long-anticipated and highly-speculated All-Winners season also crowning the first-ever Queen of All Queens in 2022; and not one but TWO RuPaul’s Drag Race’s vs. The World (literally, the entire world!) have crowned our first-ever and our second-ever global drag superstars. We are constantly being introduced to new queens and re-introduced to returning queens who are ready to slay, stay, and lip-sync the house down boots. 

We’ve also seen our first bio/AFAB queen shantay into the werkroom (on the UK version) as well as, on the mothership, our first transman compete, our first cishet white man compete, as well as a fabulously increasing number of openly-out transwomen compete on seasons that, since airing, have had even more trans-identifying folks share their truths and lived experiences with us in both the Untucked episodes and in the æther of social media paratexts. Even an up-and-coming queen we featured in our first collection went on to compete on a season of Canada’s Drag Race! (Still no drag kings, though…yet?) As editors of the first volume of RuPedagogies, we could feel the show and its platform busting at the seams (sequins on the runway!) as we submitted our complete manuscript to the press, copy-edited final proofs, and compiled the index. That was due in large part to all this progress being made and the promises of more and more progress yet to come. But today, these promises are being foreclosed upon, and these progresses - and the many that have come before us -  are, quite literally, under attack right now. From assaults on libraries and schools for hosting Drag Queen Story Hours, through K-12 and post-secondary curricula being threatened and defunded, to the cultural, racial, and health tensions escalating across the globe with legislation being proposed and passed against 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and freedoms, teaching and learning itself, too, is non-hyperbolically under attack right now. 

Everything we are celebrating, have been celebrating, and have been hoping to one day celebrate together, people are trying to destroy: and part of this new volume on RuPaul’s Drag Race and teaching and learning is going to be celebratory, yes…but we’re also going militant this time. So, given the rise in hate, conservatism, and christofascism around the world, how are we today approaching not just the international juggernaut of Drag Race but also of drag itself and of drag bodies, trans bodies, queer bodies, and all bodies of all kinds? What and how is RuPaul’s Drag Race, together with and/or separate from its adjacent/parallel reality competition shows and its spin-offs around the world, teaching us about love, hate, and social, racial, and health justice? And what and how are we still learning, unlearning, and relearning as we with the franchise keep going, keep growing, and start - and continue! - to push (back) and fight (back)?

We are inviting abstracts for even more chapters on RuPaul, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and the paratextual cultures surrounding them both - with an empowered focus on social, racial, and health justice and politics. Chapters on or connected to intersections of RuPaul, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Pedagogy, Education, and/or SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), SOED (Scholarship of Educational Development), and DBER (Discipline-Based Educational Research) are particularly encouraged. Possible chapter topics and foci might include (and we say might!), but are certainly not limited to:

• Translation Studies and International Studies
• Disability, Accessibility, and Modification
• Classroom Best/Wise Practices, Experiential Learning, Work-Integrated Learning, Creative Assessments
• Social, Racial, and Health Justice and Politics
• Homophobia, Dragphobia, Transphobia in public pedagogies, K-12 systems, and legal policies and legislature
• Intersectional Identities and Experiences (race, age, ability, sex, gender, religion, faith, class, wealth, weight, size, language, family, etc.)
• Capitalism and Consumerism (i.e., Music, Fashion, Branding, etc.)
• Lesson Planning, Course Design, and Curriculum Development
• RuPaul’s Drag Race and/across STEM Disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
• Drag Kings, Bio/Faux Queens, Trans and Enby Queens - Queens and Performers!
• Indigenous Kings, Queens, Performers, and/or Two-Spirit Ways of Being (and Dragging)
• RuPaul’s Personal Biases Influencing the Show and Education of the Audience
• Games Studies and Digital Humanities 
• The Art and Theatricality of Performance and the Design Challenges - i.e., the “need” to be a quadruple threat: Singer, Dancer, Actor, Seamstress 
• The Queens After their Seasons and their New Roles as Ambassadors of Drag Race and of social, racial, and health justice
• Drag Race Alumni as Teachers/Academics/Public Pedagogues (i.e., Sasha Velour, MFA and Fulbright Scholar; and Alyssa Edwards, Owner and Dance Teacher, Beyond Belief Dance Company – also, RuPaul’s dubbing of Season 11 contestant as “The Reverend Dr. Silky Nutmeg Ganache”)
• …what have we neglected to identify here that you’d like to write on? Propose it, girl!

We also are expressly interested in chapters that respond directly to RuPedagogies 1 in light of post-August 2020 developments in the franchise and across the world.

Key Dates and Timeline:

• Proposals/Abstracts (500 words max.) + Author(s) Bios (150 words max.):
  • Submissions due by Monday, October 31, 2023 
• Invitations for full chapters sent to authors:
  • Monday, November 20, 2023
• Full chapters (6000-8000 words, including references) submission:
  • Monday, June 3, 2024
• Feedback on full chapter drafts back to authors:
  • Friday, July 5, 2024
• Revised chapters from authors due: 
  • Friday, August 16, 2024

Please email submissions and queries to RuPedagogy@gmail.com.