Texas Christian University Offering New Drag Course
A Texas Christian University is now offering a new drag queen course where students will perform lip syncs, develop an on-stage persona, and study songs like Cardi B's "WAP." And no this apparently is not a joke.
As reported by the Daily Mail, the course is titled 'The Queer Art of Drag' and has been offered as part of Texas Christian University's Women and Gender Studies Department since spring 2023.
The course is taught by Dr. Nino Testa, who goes by the drag persona Maria von Clapp.
Per the course description, students are introduced to "critical drag" and will explore "drag performance as an outlet for social critique, pedagogy, and queer worldmaking."
The first week, students explore "What Even is Gender?," and students learn through texts such as "The Gender Binary is a Tool of White Supremacy" by bisexual blogger Kravitz Marshall.
"Week three involves studying Cardi B's 2020 hit "WAP" and creating a 'drag vision board', while week four takes pupils through 'A Short History of Drag,'" the Daily Mail reports.
Then students head into "Activist Drag" and later "Como La Piñata: Quirky, Weird, Genderf*ck, and Alternative Drag" which focuses on essays about drag and sex work.
To top the course off, students must create and name their drag persona, describe them, create a drag greeting, strike a pose, write a reflective essay on the development of their act, and perform a one-minute lip sync pulling together everything they have learned.
To be honest, this all sounds too good to be true. But apparently the 16-week course culminated with a night of performances at TCU's Annual Night of Drag on April 21.