Throwing shade like a drag artist: lessons about the law from drag artists
Transformative, creative pedagogies are urgently needed in legal education. Far from the cutting-edge of pedagogical practice, legal education is heavily shaped by conservative notions of ‘professionalism’. This, in turn, has often constrained the pedagogical imagination of staff who teach in the field. Where cutting-edge practices are present, they are rarely captured in literature on legal education. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are pushing for changes in legal education that could enable students to learn differently, creating forms of ‘professionalism’ that demonstrate a deep commitment to social justice and inclusivity. In this blog series, Who said that learning law is boring? Bringing Creative Teaching Methods into Legal Education, we explore how arts-based, affective and embodied teaching methods can deepen students’ learning of law and enrich socio-legal teaching. These blogs start from the premise that everyone is creative, and that taking creative approaches to legal education can build critical analytical, vocational, and civic skills. Read more about the blog series and our motivations here.
by Dr. Joy Twemlow and Dr. Rosie Fox as part of Law’s a Drag
Keywords: Drag, Legal Clinics, Queer Creativity, Contingency.
At the end of the 25/26 academic term, Law’s a Drag organised an extra-curricular Queer Legal Clinic where Leeds University law students were tasked with making informative resources for drag artists. Law’s a Drag is a network of drag artists and legal academics, of all genders and levels of experience, who research and fight against the injustices faced by the drag community. As part of our previous work, the drag artists had identified areas of law that they wanted to learn more about as it impacted their everyday experience - specifically they highlighted the legal areas around discrimination and harassment. We felt that a law clinic would be a great opportunity for law students to engage with drag artists; both to gain the skills in producing legal resources, and to get a wider perspective on law as it is lived. Additionally, the clinic would facilitate collaborative work between drag artists, students, and academics to ensure that drag artists’ voices were centred and reflected in the final outputs.
The clinic itself involved three broad phases: First, students were given an introductory session on queer theory, best practices around engaging with the LGBTQI+ community, and on writing legal information material. This introductory session also included a planning workshop where the students broke down the resources they would work on, and compiled a plan for completing necessary research. The second phase involved the students working on draft written resources. Throughout this second phase, we held online review sessions with the students - as well as a dedicated engagement session with drag artists who provided feedback on the accessibility and relevance of the drafted material. The final session involved working closely with the drag artist group, Packin’ Heat, to turn the written resources into short drag video skits that could be shared on social media.
When designing the format of the clinic, we considered how we could disrupt the traditional relationship between the ‘legal experts’ and the ‘clients’. Drag artists are experts not only in their own lived experience of the law, but in enacting queer creativity through performance. We therefore included this final performative element to the clinic to facilitate an environment where students, drag artists - and ourselves! - walked away from the experience having learnt from each other.
Queer Creativity
Creativity speaks to the tactile process of being an agent that brings something into the world; the idea of creating an output that is contingent because it wouldn’t have existed without the perspective and effort of the individual who made it. Thus, when we ask students to be creative it is an effort to push them away from mere reproduction of content towards activities that inject their individual perspective into their engagement with legal knowledge (Twemlow, 2023).
The concept of queering also speaks to the pursuit of locating and enacting contingency – often towards radical ends (Browne and Nash, 2017). To queer something, we would say, is not merely to do something different or unique – but is a refusal to reproduce the status-quo with the explicit aim of bringing about alternative futures. Queering is an act of believing that alternative futures are possible, and thus embrace the contingency of social, political, and legal realities (Ahmed, 2006 pg. 178).
Our Queer Legal Clinic was motivated by not only the desire – but the need – to imagine alternative social, political, and legal realities with the drag artists that we work with. Drawing on the traditional legal clinic model, the idea was to give students the opportunity to engage with real life clients – in this case, drag artists – to produce legal resources which would be of use to the wider drag community. It was however, important that we accounted for the hostile social, political, and legal environment that drag artists currently navigate within the UK. Many of the drag artists in our network also identify as trans, and there has been a vitriolic campaign over the past decade to corrode this community’s legal rights and humanity. In explicitly organising a queer legal clinic, our collective aim was to instil students with a critical and radical orientation: to appreciate the limitations of the law to bring about just futures and, at the same time, demonstrate that the status-quo is contingent and they are agents who can undertake actions directed towards generating alternative futures.
Lessons in Queer Creativity from Drag Artists
1. Knowledge in the body
Working with the drag artists taught us how access to, and use of, the law is often unevenly distributed based on positionality. This critical perspective on the law is something that we wanted to instil in the students from the introductory session, but acting out the experiences of the drag artists, and speaking aloud concerns these artists had around engaging the law, gave more tactility to this unevenness of the law. In Throwing like a girl, Iris Marion Young (1980) discusses the way in which bodily freedom is restricted along gendered lines within a patriarchal society: that certain bodies are habituated into hesitation for a number of reasons, including personal safety. This bodily experience of hesitation in relation to the law, given the various ways legal institutions have enacted homophobia and transphobia, was something that was evident in engaging with drag artists. In performing the ways that, for example, drag artists can understandably be reluctant to report incidents to law enforcement - students were able to gain a more tactile understanding of the complexities of uneven access to the law. In the student feedback, the ability to make the video resources alongside the drag artists and see how the law affects ‘real people’ came out as one of the valuable aspects of the experience.
2. There is room for laughter in critique
The drag artists showed us that you can laugh and have fun while critiquing (or throwing shade) at the law - and this enjoyment does not necessarily detract from the critique that is being advanced. In The Radical Imagination Haiven and Khasnabish highlight that movements in the left often fail to relate radical action to human desires ‘for leisure, love, fun and so on’ (2014, pg 180). While not all drag is joyful or radical, many drag artists are both; playing a central role in queer liberation and in sustaining joy within the LGBTQI+ community. Our experience of performing the skits on harassment and discrimination was one where critique of the legal framework existed alongside moments of full-on belly laughter. In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed (2006) speaks of the potential to open up ‘other paths’ when we queer our bodily habits. While experiencing levity and laughter alongside enacting critique does not directly point to a more just future, it is a shift in the bodily orientation towards the object of law. And our thinking is that maybe this bodily shift can help to form stronger relationships of solidarity needed to achieve just futures - that maybe it provides the emotional sustenance we need to continue pushing for change - and that maybe, in taking up alternative bodily habits towards law (and the legal classroom) the contingency of law, society, and the future becomes more apparent.
3. Creativity, contingency and imagination
The short form content being created required that we stick closely to pre-written scripts and thus there was less of a focus on imagining alternative futures. Despite this, there was still an underlying theme of contingency in the performance aspect that was not present in the previous phases. While putting together the video resources, we spoke with the drag artists and students about how the experience would have differed if it wasn’t undertaken together in person, how different these video resources were to the written resources, and contrasted the experience of performing (in sparkly outfits) to previous times we had been in the same legal classroom. While the phase of producing the written resources could be characterised as a linear process of iterative improvement, the performance aspect had a more fluid character. It is difficult to directly connect the activities in the clinic, and especially the performance element, to any conclusion about the relationship between creativity and (radical) imagination. However, there was a definite sense that participating in the clinic changed the students’ perceptions of what was possible after their law degree and, thus, expanded their imagination at the personal level. Specifically, the students stressed how the clinic made them want to ‘work with people and see like an impact that the work that you do has for people rather than just seeing it like in a big company’.
LAD Next Steps
Having wrapped up the clinic just as we started the 26/27 academic year there are still aspects of the resources left to tidy-up before publication. Our hope is to release the videos and written resources via Law’s a Drag in the first half of 2027 so keep an eye on our website (lawsadrag.org.uk), Bluesky (@lawsadrag), and Instagram page (@lawsadrag)!
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