Biden admin funds drag queen story-hour performer’s latest book on ‘cruising gay men and witchy women’

The Biden administration is funding a scholarly book on queer artists and digital privacy written by a drag queen who has written several drag-themed children’s books.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in January announced a $60,000 grant for a book about how drag performers and trans/queer subjects “playfully dazzle both human senses and sensors. computers,” drawing on “case studies including drag queens, trans taxi drivers, gay men on cruises, and female witches.”

Book author Harris Kornstein stars as Lil Miss Hot Mess, a staple of controversial hours in drag queen history who has become a lightning rod for Republican politicians and parenting rights organizations who argue that the events expose children to sexually suggestive content.

Lil Miss Hot Mess is also listed as the author of the children’s books “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish” and “If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It”, two revisions on the theme of popular children’s drag. rhymes.

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The description of NEH’s research agenda says the book will explore “digital enchantment,” which the author describes as “a framework that explores how diverse queer and trans users subvert and expand traditional approaches to privacy by leveraging creatively the functionality of consumer technologies and creating their own platforms.”

The book aims to challenge assumptions that view online privacy as primarily hiding information, according to the project’s description, while the streak offers a way to flood algorithms with alter ego images that confuse surveillance systems digital.

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“Drawing on case studies from San Francisco, including drag queens, trans taxi drivers, gay cruisers, and witch women, I turn to LGBTQ+ stories that complicate these assumptions,” the statement says. description of Kornstein’s project. “Digital enchantment describes the hyper-visible glamour, mischief, and mystical intuition that many queer/trans subjects employ to playfully dazzle both human senses and computer sensors.”

The project appears to bear some similarities to Kornstein’s 2019 essay on flirting and digital counter-surveillance. In this article, Kornstein explores drag as a source of “practical techniques for managing one’s identity and avoiding, thwarting, or mitigating harm to data-driven forms of surveillance.”

For example, extravagant makeup and costume changes by drag performers would confuse facial recognition algorithms on social media, causing confusion and distrust of platforms, Kornstein found.

“Specifically, I position drag as a social performance practice that not only disrupts masculinity/femininity, but also disclosure/concealment, transformation/stability, and truth/fiction,” Kornstein wrote.

Kornstein’s alter ego, Lil Miss Hot Mess, has been a flashpoint in the controversy surrounding drag queen performances targeting children and has championed children’s books and events as co-founder and board member of administration of Drag Queen Story Hour, an international organization.

“I wrote (“The Hips on the Drag Queen”) because I wanted everyone to experience the magic of drag and practice a little shaking their hips or shaking their shoulders – to find out how fabulous we can feel inside our own bodies,” Lil Miss Hot Mess said during a Drag Queen Story Hour featured on PBS in 2021.

In this screenshot, Lil Miss Hot Mess reads a drag-themed children’s book (World of Wonders/Getty Images for World of Wonders)

One of the Lil Miss Hot Mess books was reportedly featured in children’s drag queen events at Ramstein Air Base in Germany in 2021, before the military installation canceled an event scheduled for June 2022 after returning of Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and other conservative leaders.

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“These inappropriate events are extremely divisive at home for good reason; in any case, they place young children in close proximity to adults who are intentionally and explicitly sexualized,” Rubio wrote to the Air Force the last year. “A flyer for last year’s similar event pointed to the apparent inclusion of a controversial book, ‘The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.'”

Kornstein, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.