#KeepKidsInnocent: What Twitter Discourse on Drag Queens, Disney, and Dolly Parton Teaches Us about the Intersection of Anti-Queerness with Parenting Politics

Abstract

This essay examines social media discourse related to drag queens, Disney, and Dolly Parton for what it says about how anti-queerness intersects with the present political and cultural obsession with parents’ responsibility to protect their children from “harm.” By analyzing tweets collected from the summer of 2022, I demonstrate the ways in which pedagogy and nostalgia help explain how users evaluate contemporary “threats” to children. Users want to know what children are learning, from whom, and in what context (pedagogy); at the same time, users invoke a reverence for the past (nostalgia) as they try to interpret what they are experiencing in the present. Twitter users’ concerns about children center on “fears” related to gender identity and sexual orientation, for instance, “exposing” children to queerness. This discourse is part of an unsettling trend in which anti-queerness is masquerading as concern for the nation’s children.