She Kills Cisheteronormativity: Queerness in She Kills Monsters and Dungeons & Dragons

for Queer Theatre class, 2023

In Qui Nguyen's She Kills Monsters, "average"[1] Agnes – an English teacher in the original; a cheerleader, that quintessentially ‘normal’ pursuit for ‘normal’ girls, in the Young Adventurers version – unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, is introduced to D&D through playing a D&D module written by her deceased teenage sister Tilly. Tilly’s D&D module doubles as a sort of coded diary, and Agnes learns things about her sister of which she had previously been unaware, including exploration of non-heteronormative sexuality.[2]

A Brief History of Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, which boils down to a combination of complex tactical board game, collaborative storytelling, and amateur improv theatre performed only for an audience of your fellows playing the game with you[3]. It has tremendous overlap with a myriad of subjects – drama, English Language Arts, teaching (half my repertoire of teaching tricks originates in D&D), very basic arithmetic, and so on. Tuns of ink have been metaphorically spilled arguing the nuances of D&D as relating to game design and ludology, to socializing activity design, to social justice, to queerness, and to other things.

The current edition of D&D is known as 5th Edition, because, just as you might expect, there have been at least eight distinct editions of D&D:

• 1974: Original Dungeons & Dragons – The barebones original version created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, adapted from a game of army warfare.[4]
• 1977: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition[5] – Greatly expanded from the original in terms of gameplay options, this was the first edition to see large-scale publication.
• 1989: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition[6] – As She Kills Monsters is set in 1995, this is most likely the edition Agnes, Tilly, and so on play – as confirmed by the narrator’s line at the beginning of the play, “Forged by the hands of nerds, crafted in the minds of geeks, and so advanced in its advanciness it would take a whole second edition to contain all its mighty geekery.”[7]
• 2000: Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition[8] – The first edition published after the property was acquired by Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, also known as the creators of the collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
• 2003: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5th Edition[9] – 3.5th Edition was a fairly minor yet comprehensive rules update to 3rd Edition, allowing a certain amount of backwards-compatibility, so you could continue to play your 3rd Edition characters in a way you couldn’t have continued to play existing characters in any previous edition change.
• 2008: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition[10] – Most notable because, when D&D shifted from 3.5th Edition to 4th Edition, many fans disliked the new edition and felt disenfranchised, so new company Paizo swept in with Pathfinder 1st Edition in 2009, which was basically another version of 3.5th Edition, to the extent that many nicknamed it ‘D&D 3.75e’ – the similarity was great enough that backwards-compatibility was alleged as a major selling point, but in my experience rarely actually taken advantage of[11]. Pathfinder remains D&D’s biggest competitor, although they have increasingly diverged from their common source over time and new editions.
• 2014: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition[12] – Something of a synthesis and a distillation of all previous D&D editions, and one which has brought in an unprecedented influx of players new to the hobby.
• The 2024 update to Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition – They keep changing what they’re calling the 2024 version – most commonly it is called “One D&D”, but its official name appears to be something like “the revision to 5th Edition D&D to be released in 2024”. Despite it being almost exactly analogous to 3.5th Edition’s relationship to 3rd Edition, I have seen neither WotC nor any prominent fan refer to it as “5.5th Edition”.[13]

Personally, I came into the hobby around 2010, and, though I played a few games of 4th Edition, I ultimately preferred 3.5th Edition, then Pathfinder. When Paizo printed a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder and WotC printed a 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I found I preferred D&D 5th Edition, so I switched teams again.

The Queerness of Geekery

D&D is, of course, eminently queer in a variety of ways – never mind what the grognards[14] of the hobby will tell you, and never mind the reputed conservative politics of Gary Gygax himself. It is an ongoing cold war within the hobby that D&D either is, or is not, ‘political’, and every slight move that either Wizards of the Coast or, in some cases, prominent fans make towards ‘wokeness’ is met with an uproar of outrage from a contingent of grognards.

For example: since the inception of D&D, the term “race” has been used in a Tolkien-esque sense, to refer to Elves, Orcs, Humans, etc.[15] Unfortunately for the hobby, “race” is a term that carries a tremendous amount of real-world baggage, so in 2019, Paizo switched from “race” to “ancestry” in its shift from a 1st to a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder, and WotC is catching up by switching from “race” to “species” for the 2024 version of 5th Edition D&D. This ameliorates (but does not solve) the problem that some races – especially orcs and drow/dark elves – are generally presented as antagonists and have, historically, been treated (or even, in earlier editions, outright described by the game) as inherently evil. However, both changes and the reasoning for them remain controversial, contested primarily by grognards who, in general, resist change of any sort[16].

Gygax himself has, as mentioned, a reputation as having been socially conservative – for example, he was “known to carry a weapon” and “known to be a member of the Libertarian Party”, according to the FBI’s file on him and his company[17]. In the earliest editions of the game penned by Gygax, non-human races faced limits (such as level caps) not imposed upon humans, and in 1st Edition, female characters had a lower maximum Strength score than male characters of the same race[18]. Observing these facts is perhaps more unkind to Gygax than necessary – he did, in his later years, seem to recognize the inherent queerness of D&D, and recanted some of his earlier design decisions.

At the beginning of She Kills Monsters, the point is immediately recognized that “geeky”[19] pursuits like D&D are inherently queer, in a way that is generally lost on grognards (or it could be that grognards attempt to suppress nonconformity in their hobby for the same reason any marginalized minority may end up attempting to oppress and marginalize other, more marginalized, minorities) – normal Agnes is initially put off by the demeanor of Chuck, Tilly’s dungeon master, and is reluctant to try D&D at all; once she does, she proceeds repeatedly throughout the play to try to hide the fact that she is playing D&D (even to the point that for a time she allows her boyfriend to believe she’s cheating on him rather than admit to doing something geeky).[20]

“Why Do Gamer Dudes Always Play Girl Characters?”[21]

One of D&D’s queerest aspects is explored in She Kills Monsters: the play recognizes and probes D&D’s capacity to allow for exploration of sexual or romantic orientations and gender.

In the Young Adventurers Edition, the character Tilly plays in D&D before her death, Tillius the paladin, is male, a different gender than Tilly’s own presumed gender, a common phenomenon known in the hobby as ‘crossplaying’. Tillius only appears in the play after Tilly’s death, presented (we presume faithfully, from the module Tilly wrote, described as a coded diary) by Chuck the dungeon master, but the character of Tillius nonetheless represents Tilly – at least until (though maybe also after) he turns out to be an evil five-headed dragon god in disguise. [22]

Similarly, the character of Kaliope is played by an apparently male performer in drag in the BAVPA production, which goes un-commented-upon.[23]

Agnes: "Why would she do that?"

Chuck: "I don't know, why do gamer dudes always play girl characters?"[24]

I personally know, at the absolute minimum, at least two people (including myself) who are explicitly confirmed to have changed their self-recognized gender identities or presentations because of having explored gender options in D&D. I know at least a dozen more who have crossplayed without it necessarily having an impact on their genders or reflecting real-world gender exploration – while something like half of them have turned out to be transgender, I haven’t explicitly confirmed with them any direct causal connections between that and crossplaying.

The Belt of Gender-Changing has been a cursed item found in D&D for many editions, which helps to open the scope of gameplay and storytelling to exploration of trans stories. You put it on, it alters your biological sex, and you can’t take it off until you cast remove curse on it. My main problem with this item is its name – it would take powerful mind-altering enchantment to alter a person’s gender, whereas altering their sex is a trivial feat of transmutation in a world with such spells as alter self and polymorph, which can wreak much more substantial bodily changes than mere sex changes. To be sure, many groups play with this item as a sometimes-malicious joke, but in my experience, for every group playing it that way, there’s a group playing with it to actually deeply explore gender.

Tillius, moreover, is in a relationship with fellow D&D character Lilith – one appeal of D&D for Tilly, we are told, is that Tillius "gets to save the princess"[25]. Lilith is based on Lily, a fellow player with whom Tilly shares her first kiss, although neither Tilly nor Lily is out of their closets in any official capacity – being 15, Tilly is still exploring her sexual identity, at least in the Young Adventurers Edition:

Agnes: "Are you [lesbian]?"

Tillius: "I… don't really know?"[26]

That doesn’t stop a group of cheerleader demons from bullying and making fun of Tilly for being a lesbian, implied to be based on an actual event from Tilly's life – Chuck: “I think this is actually your sister’s diary. She just wrote it in geek.”[27]

In the original version, everyone in the game’s setting is homosexual (including Tillius, who in this version is female, not crossplayed):

Agnes: “Wait, the big slacker demon is gay?”

Kaliope: “As is everyone in New Landia.”[28]

This is a reflection of Tilly’s own homosexuality:

Agnes: “Tilly, why’d you make everyone gay?”

Tillius: “Um, I don’t know. If I were to take an educated guess, I’d venture to guess that maybe the author of this world was into wearing tanktops and The Indigo Girls.”[29]

The concept of a D&D setting where homosexuality is welcomed, and in some senses even universal, is not unheard-of in actual D&D play. It is commonly thought that Paizo’s position is all non-player characters (NPCs) in Pathfinder Adventure Paths[30], and by extension in the setting, are bisexual unless the text specifically says otherwise – the official position is somewhat more nuanced, as clarified by James Jacobs, creative director for Pathfinder’s Adventure Paths:

Milo v3: “Is it true that NPC's in the Adventure Paths are bisexual unless otherwise stated?”

James Jacobs: “Sort of. More accurately, unless their sexuality plays into something significant of their character (such as them being in an established relationship), it's not something we decide for NPCs. They can be whatever the GM wants them to be, which isn't EXACTLY the same as ‘always bisexual.’ The ‘Always bisexual’ is a simplification.”[31]

In my home D&D setting, after long struggles with what policy would be best, I have made it canon that 90% of NPCs are panromantic – ‘romantic’ because I prefer sex not to be a very big deal in my D&D games, ‘pan’ because it’s a little more intuitively inclusive than ‘bi’ – and the remaining 10% are evenly divided between some flavors of heteroromantic, homoromantic, or aromantic. Moreover, polyamory is well-accepted in society and by most deities. It would be nice for me to say that this is all for the purpose of representation and social justice, but in all honesty it’s just so the romance options for player characters are maximized, for the purpose of gameplay fun[32] – if you want to pursue an NPC romantically, it is almost certainly an option, even if they, or your own character, are already in a romantic relationship.

“This is a D&D adventure, not therapy.”[33]

The characters of the party that Tilly puts together, the characters played by her friends, are a queer crew in the tradition of Dorothy’s Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. They include Orcus the retired demon Overlord of the Underworld (a name drawn from the canon of D&D, where he is the demon king of the undead); Lilith, a demon queen whose father is “the Devil”[34] (a name drawn from real-world mythology, most famously the alleged first wife of Adam in certain apocrypha of Judaism/Christianity, banished from the Garden of Eden for insisting on being on top when making love to Adam); and Kaliope, a dark elf, a race shunned and considered evil by others.

A digression on race: the script calls for Kaliope to be a dark elf, or drow, but that comes with its own heap of issues, rooted in the issues with the drow species itself. Evil spider-worshipping matriarchal dominatrices with literal black skin (sometimes dark indigo in illustrations, never brown) are not a concept that would pass muster with a cultural sensitivity consultant today[35]. Two obvious options present themselves for casting Kaliope in this play as written: either put a white person in blackface, which has obvious problems; or cast a Black person as Kaliope, which has different, equally serious problems.

Casting a non-Black person as a drow and painting them with blackface runs into the issue that blackface has historically been used in minstrel shows to make fun of and oppress actual Black people, and is therefore utterly verboten. In the second season episode of the television sitcom Community, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”, the Asian actor Ken Jeong, playing Asian character Ben Chang, who was in turn playing drow character Brutalitops the Magician by coming to a D&D game in blackface. Ultimately, this was poking fun at the Chang character’s cluelessness and at the issues inherent with the drow in D&D, but the episode was nonetheless pulled from Netflix and Hulu in 2020.[36] No production of She Kills Monsters could possibly get away with casting Kaliope as a person in blackface makeup.

Casting a Black person as Kaliope presents problems which reflect the core issue with the drow species in D&D. Drow are usually depicted as literally black of skin, or sometimes some shade of dark indigo, no hue ever found on any real-world human – but the point remains that a species of usually-evil[37] antagonists use a visual shorthand that describes an actual marginalized group of humans.

Why did the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feature no drow, despite an excursion to the Underdark, their traditional stomping grounds?[38] After the movie came out, I saw a solid half dozen articles wondering why the drow Drizz’t Do’Urden, possibly the most famous D&D character, did not make an appearance in this movie. The obvious answer: good luck casting a drow in anything without radically updating their appearance!

Maybe you could get away with casting a Black person and painting them with black- or indigo-face makeup – but probably best not to risk it.

So the BAVPA performance of She Kills Monsters, among others, went with the somewhat less contentious casting choice making Kaliope a regular – i.e., with a beigey skin tone – elf, not a dark elf.[39]

At the end of the play, Tillius turns out to be, by some strange turn of events, the evil five-headed dragon god Tiamat (another name and concept drawn from D&D’s canon: Tiamat is the goddess of evil dragons[40]) that the party has been questing to defeat for the duration of the play – and to have been Tiamat since at least the earliest part of the quest, because Tillius casting magic missile, a spell not traditionally castable by paladins, is cited as evidence for Tillius being Tiamat[41]. This could potentially add a new twist, a new facet, to the exploration of Tilly’s psyche. Did Tilly see herself as a multi-headed dragon?

The five heads of Tiamat are played by doubling the actors of Agnes’s party – Tillius/Tilly, Lilith/Lily, Orcus/Ronnie, Kaliope/Kelly, and Chuck the DM. Might this represent Tilly’s struggles with friendship – or Agnes’s struggles with D&D?

Post-Script: Disability Is Queer, Too!

Disability is baked into She Kills Monsters. The script casts Kelly, the beautiful human player corresponding to the beautiful dark elf game character Kaliope, as a girl in a wheelchair (Kaliope does not need or use a wheelchair). BAVPA instead cast Kelly as walking with crutches[42].

Georgia State University transferred the wheelchair use to Tilly and Tillius[43] – although it was not well-supported in 1995, playing a character with a wheelchair is perfectly possible in this day and age, thanks to a well-known fan-made unofficial “Combat Wheelchair” supplement for D&D 5th Edition[44], which naturally has been the subject of many angry tirades from grognards who somehow contrive to find wheelchairs less realistic than orcs, magic missile, liches, dragons, meddlesome gods, hungry gelatinous cubes, demons, and polymorphing people into chickens.

Works Cited

Beuth, K. (Director). (2023, May 31). She Kills Monsters. (BAVPA 11th/12th Grade Theater Department, Performer) BAVPA Black Box Theater, Buffalo, NY, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmQxs99zWGU

Bulmahn, J. (2009). Pathfinder: Core Rulebook. Paizo Publishing.

City Springs Theatre Company . (2022). She Kills Monsters. Georgia, USA. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7deLsNgb9Q

Cook, D. (1989). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monstrous Compendium. TSR, Inc.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2000). Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Cook, M., Tweet, J., & Williams, S. (2003). Dungeons & Dragons v3.5: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1995, April 28). 149A-SF-106204. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Retrieved from https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3866268-TSR-Pt-4.html

Goldstein, J., & Daley, J. F. (Directors). (2023). Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves [Motion Picture].

Gygax, G. (1977-1979). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide. TSR, Inc.

Gygax, G., & Arneson, D. (1974). Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set. TSR, Inc.

Heinsoo, R., Collins, A., & Wyatt, J. (2008). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast.

Jacobs, J. (2015, April 5). Ask *James Jacobs* ALL your Questions Here! Retrieved from Paizo Discussion Forums: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=1082?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#54090

Maas, J. (2020, June 26). Netflix Pulls ‘Community’ Episode ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Due to Blackface Scenes. The Wrap. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/community-advanced-dungeons-and-dragons-episode-removed-netflix-blackface/

Mearls, M. C. (2024). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Mearls, M., Crawford, J., Perkins, C., & Wyatt, J. (2014). Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide. Wizards of the Coast.

Nguyen, Q. (2011, November 4). She Kills Monsters. Samuel French, Inc.

Nguyen, Q. (2012, November 14). She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition. Samuel French, Inc.

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved from https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_

Wiktionary. (2023, May 5). grognard. Retrieved June 24, 2023, from Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grognard

Critical Queer and Disability Theory in the Secondary English Classroom

for English Education Comprehensive Exam, 2024

Critical Queer Theory in the ELA Classroom

There are two senses in which ELA pedagogy can be queer: in one sense, we might study texts featuring queer characters or themes; in the other, somewhat more abstruse sense, it is queer to look at a text slantwise, focusing on violations of social normalcy and norms (especially, but not exclusively, sexual or gender norms) within the text – to look at the text with the queer lens. I would maintain that both senses are good and desirable, and an intersection between the two – looking slantwise at texts featuring queer characters – is best of all.

Queer pedagogy calls for queer readings […] in at least two ways: incorporating texts about and from the perspective of queer subjects, and reading queerly. The mainstream curriculum already includes, or at least allows for including, plenty of texts written by and about queers; it is just that we read them ‘straight.’ If reading queerly is seeking out the queer or potentially queer meanings in a text […] then reading straight is reading around queer meanings and seeking out meanings that support normalcy. […] Queer educators […] need to notice what it is that reading straight has prevented us from knowing, and invite the queer subtext back into our readings. (Shlasko, 2005)

Queer theory, and pedagogy in reference to queer theory, is a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as 2005, queer theory was “often discussed not as a discrete theoretical model, but rather as an indeterminate and shifting set of theoretical possibilities. […] Queer pedagogy, like queer theory, resists stable discrete definition. […] Queer pedagogy is a queer thing to study, and so only a ‘queer lens’ will suffice to examine it.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Texts With Queer Content

As a matter of definition, queer is anything that stands outside the ‘normal’, chiefly, but not necessarily exclusively, in terms of gender and/or sexuality. “As a subject position, queer describes people whose gender and/or sexuality fall outside of cultural norms and expectations. It describes one’s location relative to those norms, or perhaps, one’s status from the point of view of the normal as an outsider.” (Shlasko, 2005) For the purpose of this paper, the entire long and ever-growing alphabet soup (LGBTQQPIA23NF[1]… etc.) of sexual and gender identities is included within the umbrella of this sense of queer.

Some teachers, especially newer or pre-service teachers, may “believe that teachers must be neutral and apolitical” (Bach, 2016); the prima facie response could be that the identity of a substantial portion of one’s students is not a political matter, states which ban discussion of such subjects (Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557, 2022) notwithstanding – but my position would target the premise itself: there are certain political matters that secondary school teachers are not only permitted but expected to address and to equip students to come to a socially just personal position on: is, for example, a social studies teacher covering the 20th century expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of the social pros and cons of Nazis and Fascists? Is a science teacher expected to remain neutral and apolitical on the subject of intelligent design, whether humans have landed on the moon, or whether the Earth is flat? Is a math teacher expected to acquiesce in the name of neutrality and apoliticality to a student who insists that π is equal to exactly 3 (Bible, 1611)? There are some few political subjects where there is an objectively correct and good position, and the existence, identity, validity, acceptance, and welcoming of queer students is one of them.

It is good and important to include texts featuring queer characters and themes in the ELA classroom – “Given the number of studies that indicate the importance of including these titles in secondary schools as a way to validate and explore students’ sexual orientation and gender expression, meet curriculum standards, and address bullying, these books belong in secondary classrooms”. (Bach, 2016) “The absence of school-based supports such as inclusive curricula is associated with school climates more hostile to [queer] students.” (Schey, 2021)

In the 1990s, students might have had access to “historical texts detailing Nazi medical experiments; ‘scientific’ information in biology class asserting that homosexuality was genetic, and neither unhealthy nor voluntary; literary images of depressed and alienated gay people much older than myself; […] Ellen DeGeneres’s (1997) (finally!) coming out episode.” (Shlasko, 2005) Today, fortuitously, “adolescents have access to a wide range of books that feature LGBTQ and gender variant themes and characters.” (Bach, 2016) “Each of these genres of gay/lesbian representations has multiple messages, and will have different meanings for different students.” (Shlasko, 2005)

That said, “research continues to suggest that teachers are reluctant or unsure how to incorporate these LGBTQ-themed texts into their classrooms, other than as independent/out-of-school reading.” (Bach, 2016) I would answer to such teachers: the most productive way to read a queer text is queerly (subsequently proceeding to read straight texts and the world queerly, too).

Queering the Text: the Queer Lens

“Queer pedagogy […] pulls from queer theories and ‘requires something larger than simply an acknowledgement of gay and lesbian subjects in educational studies.’” (Bach, 2016) “As a politic, queer challenges the very idea of ‘normal.’ […] As an aesthetic, queer looks for and enjoys potentially subversive content in cultural texts of any media. […] The text itself is not queer. Rather, it is one’s reading of the text as politically radical that ‘queers’ both text and reader. We might say, one is reading (or listening, or viewing) queerly.” (Shlasko, 2005) “One of queer pedagogy’s purposes is to interrupt ‘familiar patterns of thinking’”. (Bach, 2016)

Queer pedagogy beyond simple representation and inclusion is important for, among other things, the inclusion and uplifting of queer students. “To tell students that, ‘It’s okay to be gay’ is dishonest, and transparent in its dishonesty. After all, we do not tell them that it is okay to be heterosexual. The very pronouncement of tolerance assumes an underlying intolerance. […] Furthermore, simply to tell students that they are okay belies the lived experience of queer kids who feel themselves violently excluded from the realm of normal. They know very well that something is not okay.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Moreover, “If we stick to representations that are unthreatening to the norm, we only reinforce the legitimacy of the boundaries that continue to keep some people on the outside.” (Shlasko, 2005) Inclusion is “not only un-queer but actually […] anti-queer.” (Shlasko, 2005)

Teachers can “engage students with textual representations of diverse and norm-disruptive sexualities and genders in ways that work against normative and oppressive discourses, practices, and systems which produce and regulate sexuality and gender”. (Helmer, 2016) Teaching the queer lens can “disrupt[] cisheterosexism and, in turn, invite[] youth to disrupt further.” (Schey, 2021)

The queer lens is thus not just about queer representation and inclusion. To read with a queer lens is to read queerly, to queer the text and the self, to internalize the queer. In the same sense as reading with the feminist lens opens the mind to issues of gender, or reading with the Marxist lens opens the mind to issues of social class and wealth, reading with the queer lens opens the mind to the possibility that there might be more to the world than the normal, especially (but not exclusively) when it comes to gender or romantic or sexual attraction.

Critical Disability Theory in the ELA Classroom

In discussing the critical lenses in pedagogy in ENG694, we only looked at most of the important theories and lenses, but there's at least one important one that we conspicuously left out: the lens of disability.

Disability studies is of universal import: every human being is fated to become disabled (if they don't die first). As far as I can reason, the only form of oppression more universal within humanity is ageism (everyone was once an oppressed youth, and everyone will eventually be an oppressed elder if they don’t die first). In my life in particular, my partner is physically disabled, and I've got approximately three minor mental disabilities myself, so it's relevant to me already. Moreover, every teacher will, in their time, teach countless students with mental or physical disabilities – and will therefore have classrooms full of abled students with disabled classmates, abled students who can be persuaded, through the magic of the lens of disability, to better put themselves in the shoes of said disabled classmates.

Where an aspect in queer pedagogy and the queer lens is on queering the text and the self, the disability lens can have more to do with abled students becoming aware of the struggle of navigating in an uncaringly ableist world while disabled. The “responsibility [is] on able-bodied people to pay attention to how disabled people have to navigate the spaces being afforded to them, including […] educational spaces.” (Stewart & Way, 2023)

“‘Disability encompasses a broad range of bodily, cognitive, and sensory differences and capacities’ but also […] ‘the meanings we attribute to disability are shifting, elusive, and sometimes contradictory’ […] disability and education need to be understood intersectionally.” (Stewart & Way, 2023) “As a pedagogical application, [disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies] incorporate the experiences, texts, podcasts, artwork, and activism of disabled scholars of color, poverty scholars, and community activists, highlighting educational inequities to center the lives of students.” (Kulkarni, Miller, Nusbaum, Pearson, & Brown, 2023)

Disability Topics and Texts

There is a “massive diverse array of imagery related to people with disabilities.” (Nocella, 2008) Disability is common in texts, and, almost as commonly, a shorthand for – i.e., occurs in a character in conjunction with – something else, usually something negative – villains are disabled more often than heroes.

Disability can, most obviously, include physical disability, such as, most commonly in popular media, missing limbs – e.g. Star Wars[2] (Lucas, 1977-2005), How to Train Your Dragon (Sanders & DeBlois, 2010), Harry Potter (Rowling, 1997-2007), and virtually any media focusing on pirates.

In online discussions of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, debate periodically raises its head about the validity of adventurers in wheelchairs – a play option made possible by a fan-made item supplement (Thompson, 2020), popularized by a variety of Actual Play series – The questions on each side of the argument are something like: is it unreasonable to expect ADA-accessible dungeons (in the fictional game-worlds our characters inhabit)? or is it unreasonable to expect disabled players to never want to play characters who are like themselves?

Disability can also include mental disability, which is perhaps more common in the traditional literary canon – e.g. Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 1937), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey, 1962), and Flowers for Algernon (Keyes, 1966).

What, one might ask, of mental illnesses, such as sociopathy and/or psychopathy? Are they disabilities to be accommodated? What does it say about us as a society that ‘he's a psychopath’ is so often used as the entire characterization of a villain – e.g. the Joker from DC comics and movies (Finger, Kane, & Robinson, 1940)?

The lens of disability can lead one to ponder subjects that may prove important in social and legal spaces – is genetic discrimination, as one sees in Gattaca (Niccol, 1997) or X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963), fair and reasonable, or is it good that laws have been passed prohibiting it, or should those laws be strengthened?

What of people with increased ability relative to human average, such as in superhero media (including, again, X-Men (Kirby & Lee, 1963))? Is it fair that Michael Phelps is some sort of super-powered swimming mutant? Should such people be brought down to human average – or even, should everyone be brought down to a minimum, so that everyone is truly equal, as in “Harrison Bergeron” (Vonnegut, 1961)?

These Theories in My ELA Classroom

One core element of my personal teaching philosophy has to do with holding a line of defense against an epidemic of harmful and hateful misinformation, by teaching critical literacy to today’s young people; moreover teaching them to apply critical literacy to all texts, defining texts as broadly as possible: each book, story, or poem we read in English class is a text, of course; every movie, television show, or anime that a person might watch are texts; news media is a text; televised sports are texts; when you’re watching YouTube, TikTok, or Twitch, and the Algorithm draws you ineffably into a dark pit of questionably hateful politics (Ribeiro, Ottoni, West, Almeida, & Meira, 2020), you bet your sweet bippy that’s one or more texts; this goof standing at the front of your ELA classroom trying to teach you critical literacy, that’s a text; the self is a text, on whom the eye of critical literacy can very well be turned; the world can profitably be treated as a text, which overlaps critical literacy with social studies and science (without the teacher expressing any judgements or assertions about the authorship of that particular text, of course).

Each lens serves to view each text in a different way, and when the lenses are turned on the text of the self or the text of the world, an increased understanding of truths about the self or the world can be attained.

When the critical queer lens is turned on texts, the self, and the world, some students might come to realize things about their own genders or sexualities that they had not previously understood; certainly may be brought to greater understanding of queer peers; and everyone can just inherently benefit from contemplating the rejection of societal norms, even if one does not actually end up rejecting them.

Similarly, a disabled lens can bring students to understand more about their own minds, may bring better understanding of disabled peers, and may lead to slightly better lives for the disabled among us – in my experience, many problems faced by disabled people result less from overt ableism than from people simply not thinking (which, of course, has ableist results). The classic example is the maintenance guy who chooses to shovel snow off the stairs before shoveling the ramp, not pausing to think that a shoveled ramp is usable by all students while shoveled stairs are usable only by able-legged students. Perhaps if the maintenance guy had studied critical disability theory in his ELA classes, he would have paused for that thought.

Works Cited

Bach, J. (2016). Exploring queer pedagogies in the college-level YA literature course. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 917-932. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1071758

Bible (King James Version ed.). (1611). Church of England. Retrieved from https://www.bible.com/bible/1/1KI.7.KJV

Finger, B., Kane, B., & Robinson, J. (1940, April 25). Batman. DC Comics. DC Comics.

Helmer, K. (2016). Reading queer counter-narratives in the high-school literature classroom: possibilities and challenges. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(6), 902-916. doi:10.1080/01596306.2015.1120943

Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Press & Signet Books.

Keyes, D. (1966). Flowers for Algernon. Harcourt, Brace & World.

Kirby, J., & Lee, S. (1963). The X-Men. Marvel Comics.

Kulkarni, S. S., Miller, A. L., Nusbaum, E. A., Pearson, H., & Brown, L. X. (2023, July 11). Toward disability-centered, culturally sustaining pedagogies in teacher education. Critical Studies in Education. doi:10.1080/17508487.2023.2234952

Lucas, G. (Writer). (1977-2005). Star Wars, Episodes I-VI [Motion Picture].

Niccol, A. (Director). (1997). Gattaca [Motion Picture].

Nocella, A. J. (2008). Emergence of Disability Pedagogy. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies(6), 77-94.

Parental Rights in Education, CS/CS/HB 1557. (2022, July 1). Florida. Retrieved from https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=76545

Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A., & Meira, W. J. (2020, January 27). Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 131-141. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879

Rowling, J. (1997-2007). Harry Potter (Vols. I-VII). Bloomsbury.

Sanders, C., & DeBlois, D. (Directors). (2010). How to Train Your Dragon [Motion Picture].

Schey, R. (2021). Fostering Youth's Queer Activism in Secondary Classrooms: Youth Choice and Queer-Inclusive Curriculum. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(6), 623-632. doi:10.1002/jaal.1150

Shlasko, G. (2005). Queer (v.) Pedagogy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38, 123-134. doi:10.1080/10665680590935098

Steinbeck, J. (1937). Of Mice and Men. Covici Friede.

Stewart, F., & Way, L. (2023). Beyond boundaries? Disability, DIY and punk pedagogies. Research in Education, 115(1), 11-28. doi:10.1177/00345237231160301

Thompson, S. (2020). The Combat Wheelchair. Retrieved April 3, 2024, from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sirEGlUeANviDstyZMpVUDf-KVqyhs40/view?usp=sharing

Vonnegut, K. (1961, October). Harrison Bergeron. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Defying Normativity: Queerness as Strength in Wicked

for Queer Theatre class, 2023

There is little overt homosexuality in Wicked, despite featuring several romantic pairings (not to mention a strong apparently platonic friendship between two young women) but that’s among the few things about it that aren’t queer. It is commonly well-understood that characters, plots, and themes of Wicked all turn out to be queer, at the very least in the broadest sense of transgression against societal norms. Ultimately, queerness drives and strengthens the main character of Wicked, just as the antagonist is correspondingly empowered by his queerness.

Even Dorothy’s Enemies Turn Out to Be Her Friends

When discussing Wicked, there are four main levels of canon to draw upon: the 2003 Broadway musical with book by Winnie Holzman and music/lyrics by Stephen Schwartz[1]; the musical is adapted from Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West[2]; the novel is in turn written as a prequel to the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz directed by Victor Fleming[3]; the movie is itself an adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz[4]. However: the corpus of works from which Wicked descends is tremendously vaster even than that: Baum, of course, wrote some 13 sequel novels to his The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before his death in 1919; there have been a number of unofficial sequels to the movie, perhaps most famously Disney’s 1985 Return to Oz, directed by Walter Murch, based on some of Baum’s sequels; and Maguire wrote three sequel novels to Wicked; moreover, there have been countless other adaptations of Baum’s original into various other media, including a 1902 Broadway musical. There is also a movie adaptation of Wicked the musical in production, due to come out in two parts in late 2023 and 2024[5].

In the mid-20th century, being a ‘friend of Dorothy’ became code for being a gay man, derived possibly from the gay icon status of Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the 1939 movie, but also in line with the themes of the book and its adaptations. Though Dorothy is herself a standard-issue straight white girl who is not, to all appearances, in any way queer herself, she does collect a motley crew of queer, outcast friends – a walking, talking Scarecrow; a woodcutter made of tin; a Lion who lacks bravery – so Dorothy can stand as a queer icon even outside of Judy Garland herself. So it is that Wicked comes from a long and proud dynasty of queer literature.

The plot of Wicked – the musical and the novel – follows Elphaba[6]: a girl who is born with green skin; goes on to develop magical powers; forms a friendship with another girl at school who goes on to become Glinda the Good Witch of some longitudinal direction[7]; acquires a revolutionary mission to save talking Animals from a holocaust at the hands of the Wizard of Oz; and winds up falling victim to the Wizard’s propaganda and the teenaged inadvertent assassin he sends after her. Side characters include Elphaba’s sister Nessarose, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the East; and a variety of persons who wind up, through the events of the musical, becoming Dorothy’s queer companions as we see them in the movie.

Elphaba’s friendship with G(a)linda is easy to read as having romantic undertones, particularly in the transition from the hatred-filled “Loathing” to the romantic tone with which the two serenade each other in “For Good”[8], and this interpretation is one that has made Wicked very popular among young queer people. However, it is not clear to me that a homoromantic or homosexual relationship would necessarily be frowned upon in Oz; it isn’t explored enough to be understood by the audience as particularly stigmatized or not. On a meta level, ‘queerbaiting’ is itself a story that is all too familiar to queer people -- a same-sex friendship that can be read as romantic, but which is carefully kept not explicitly romantic, perhaps angling towards the sort of mainstream success that explicit homosexuality would have hindered in 2003 (and which Wicked has, of course, achieved). And we do not, of course, see any homosexual relationships in the canon, so my contention that such a romance would not necessarily actually be particularly queer in-universe has little canonical evidence for or against it.

It is facile to describe any narrative featuring physical transformation as a transgender narrative – sometimes a thing is easy because it fits, while sometimes it takes a shoehorn: the creation story of both the Scarecrow and the Tin Man could perhaps more plausibly be read as stories of transformation because of trauma, which it may be a bit of a stretch to describe as queer.

Still, the magical transformation into a Scarecrow that Elphaba imposes on Fiyero can be seen as analogous to a gender transition, but in reverse: Fiyero starts out carefree and fitting comfortably in his own skin, until he takes a beating, at which point Elphaba assigns him the body of a Scarecrow to protect him[9]. The traditional gender transition involves progressing away from one’s assigned gender at birth to a new gender, chosen by the self, though in the process becoming (distressingly) much more susceptible to beatings in today’s society.

Similarly, when Nessarose seeks to rape the munchkin Boq, her spell goes awry, potentially killing him, and Elphaba casts a competing spell to save his life, thereby transforming him into a man of tin with no heart. However it is that we see Fiyero’s transformation, Boq’s is analogous.

Disability is, of course, queer. Elphaba’s sister Nessarose struggles throughout the musical with her inability to walk and her use of a wheelchair, until Elphaba enchants her bejeweled slippers to allow her to walk[10] – the very same ruby slippers that Dorothy then inadvertently steals in the movie and Elphaba seeks to recover[11].

In Oz, the societal expectation of Lions is that they are brave. The Lion of these stories, being cowardly due to the events of the musical[12], is therefore queer.

Of course, the Wizard himself turns out to be, on all four levels of canon, a fraud with limited magical ability, putting on a great show of being magically powerful, in order to take and maintain power. On one level, his is a recognizable queer story – but he leverages his power over society’s conceptions to his own ends, including the genocide of Animals, not to mention the incident of probable rape of Elphaba’s mother, none of which are particularly queer. Let’s put an asterisk on the Wizard’s queerness.

Incidentally, the Wizard’s plot to rob Animals of the ability to speak is a holocaust that targets queer folk and seeks to make them less queer by force – something homosexual and transgender people are all too familiar with in reality.

So I would ultimately say that literal homosexual or transgender content, if present – and it could be present, though not made explicit – is among the least queer thing about Wicked. The transitions of Fiyero and Boq, and a variety of other minor cases show that Wicked is suffused with queer themes. But I have not even yet touched upon the chief and foremost of my readings of queer content in this musical: Elphaba’s status as an outsider because of the color of her skin, and the way she uses or masks it to her own advantage.

“Green!”[13]

The protagonist Elphaba is, of course, green of skin, a situation which causes much of the musical’s tsuris – or at least, which drives Elphaba herself, causing both resentment and a need to excel. I wouldn’t say that the common people don’t care about Elphaba’s green skin – she certainly lists her perceptions that she is discriminated against on the basis of her skin color in “The Wizard and I”[14], and the populace does seize upon it as a reason to hate her, once prompted, in “Thank Goodness”[15] – but I would suggest that Elphaba cares about it more than they do, as evidenced in her song, “The Wizard and I”[16], where she is very keen to pretend she doesn’t care about her “verdigris”[17], but makes it clear that she does, in fact, care very much about it:

And one day, [the Wizard]'ll say to me "Elphaba,

[…]

Would it be all right by you

If I de-greenify you?"

“Of course that's not important to me;

All right, why not!" I'll reply.[18]

This is all easy to read as a commentary on racism (depending on exactly how broadly we define queerness, a discriminated-against race could itself still be considered queer), but, given that her parents are not green – indeed Elphaba seems to be the only green-skinned person in Oz – and given my contention that Elphaba cares about her green skin more than the common people do, I think this doesn’t quite fit[19]. It could fit as a homosexual, or possibly transgender (born into a body that differs from one’s self-conception), analogy. Or the story of Elphaba’s green skin could be treated as a story about disability, or about the sort of discrimination that people with vitiligo or albinism face – I suspect this last fits best, conceptually. Regardless of the parallels we draw, it is clear that Elphaba’s green skin, and the discrimination she faces because it places her fundamentally as an outsider, makes her queer, and her story a queer story.

The cause of Elphaba’s greenness has something to do with a “green elixir”[20] given to her mother by a traveling salesman (who later becomes the Wizard of Oz), who then sleeps with said mother; this could make Elphaba’s greenness a commentary on either adultery or rape, depending on how, exactly, the elixir scene is read: it’s unclear to me whether the elixir is an aphrodisiac, a sleeping draught, a love potion, alcoholic, or a nostrum with no particular effect. Given the Wizard’s depiction elsewhere (in the 1939 movie, for example) as a snake oil salesman with no particular actual powers, the last seems plausible, though it may not be the intended conclusion. If it is a nostrum or an aphrodisiac, the Wizard is relatively faultless in this case and the commentary is on Elphaba’s mother’s adultery; if it is a sleeping potion or love potion, the Wizard is guilty of rape (although love potions are a literary device with a long history, I would contend that they remain, fundamentally, rape potions). In any of these cases, Elphaba’s greenness is a ‘sins of the parents’ situation – it’s nothing about Elphaba herself that made her green, and if it’s a punishment (by the narrative, or by any deities Oz might have) then it is an undeserved punishment.

The Wizard, given his non-proficiency with actual magic, probably couldn’t actually turn Elphaba’s skin to a less queer hue like she wishes[21], but it seems obvious to me that he could grant her wish the same way he grants the wishes of Dorothy’s queer companions: it wouldn’t take much effort on the part of the Wizard’s propaganda apparatus to loop Elphaba’s appearance into the whole schtick of the Emerald City – so named because it is so very green. (In Baum’s original books, all visitors to the Emerald City are fitted with a pair of green sunglasses, illegal to remove as long as they are within city limits – and of course it transpires that not everything in the Emerald City is actually green; everything just looks green through green sunglasses.[22])

Instead, upon discovering a nefarious plot by the Wizard against Animals[23] to strip them of their ability to talk, Elphaba makes an enemy of the Wizard, and that propaganda apparatus is turned against her instead. Facing the propaganda machine of the state and the consequent opprobrium of society is, of course, a quintessentially queer story. The order of causation in reality is up for debate – taking homophobia as an example, it’s not clear whether the propaganda machine of the so-called social ‘conservative’ movement invented homophobia out of whole cloth as a tool to achieve its own malign ends, or homophobia somehow arose naturally in the general population and the ‘conservative’ movement seized it and turned it to its own ends; I would suppose probably some of both. In any event, in Wicked, it is clearly the propaganda apparatus that comes first, as the Wizard’s new press secretary first labels Elphaba a “wicked witch” at the end of Act I[24], immediately[25] followed by a mob of the populace in Act II singing a song about how bad the Wicked Witch of the West is[26].

One major theme of the musical involves the question of whether you are at risk of ultimately becoming the mask you wear; whether you take on and internalize the role society assigns you. As Elphaba sings,

Let all Oz be agreed,

I'm wicked through and through.

Since I can not succeed,

Fiyero, saving you,

I promise no good deed

Will I attempt to do again![27]

Ultimately, of course, Elphaba doesn’t actually do anything particularly wicked after that, instead faking her death and fleeing Oz – but she uses the people’s perception of her ostensible wickedness to accomplish that feat, hinging on a popular superstition that pure water would melt her[28].

Masking is ultimately a queer thing – whether you are ‘in the closet’ in terms of sexual orientation or gender or masking a neurodivergence and trying to pass as allistic. Though the closeted gay man who hates who he is so much that he goes into government to legislate against it is a classic archetype in American culture, I would venture to suppose that there is little risk of actually becoming the mask in reality. Those who are not society’s approved standard sexual orientation, gender, or neurotype cannot help but be who they actually are, no matter how intent they are on masking.

It isn’t entirely clear to me whether Elphaba leaning into society’s perception of her, as she says she’s prepared to do in “No Good Deed”, is really a decision to actually be a wicked person, or simply to wear the mask of wickedness while remaining good at heart, thereby accomplishing more than if she had continued to spend her energy fighting it. If we as queer persons in reality lean into society’s perception of us, we might be able to accomplish more than if we spend all our energy fighting it.

A contrast can certainly be drawn between the respective queernesses of Elphaba and the Wizard. While the Wizard uses his queerness and his mask to acquire power and accomplish his own evil ends (rape, genocide, etc.), Elphaba uses her queerness and her mask to try to help others and, in the end, to escape persecution by faking her death – probably, given her consistent characterization, to go on continuing to help people after the end of the musical, albeit perhaps not in Oz.

Works Cited

Baum, L. F. (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill Company.

Holzman, W., & Schwartz, S. (2003). Wicked. Broadway, New York.

Langley, N., Ryerson, F., Woolf, E. A. (Writers), & Fleming, V. (Director). (1939). The Wizard of Oz [Motion Picture].

Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. HarperCollins.

Weinersmith, Z. (2020, July 9). "Meaning". Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Retrieved from https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meaning-3

Presented Without Comment

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