“It's Hard to See How These Would be Harmful to Kids”: Public Library Staff Perceptions of Child Development and Drag Queen Storytimes

Author(s)

Sarah Barriage
Vanessa Kitzie, University of South Carolina - ColumbiaFollow
Diana Floegel
Shannon M. Oltmann

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This paper reports preliminary results of a survey of 458 US public library staff members regarding their perceptions of drag queen storytimes (DQS) and the ways in which these storytimes influence child development. The majority of respondents from libraries that have hosted at least one DQS agreed that DQS support healthy child development and positively influence children’s understanding of gender and/or sexuality, while respondents from libraries that have not hosted DQS were more likely to disagree or report being undecided. Specific ways in which respondents perceive DQS to influence child development are also analyzed.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.29173/cais1128

Publication Info

Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS/Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI, Volume 59, 2020.

Copyright (c) 2020 Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

APA Citation

Barriage, S., Kitzie, V., Floegel, D., & Oltmann, S. (2020, November). “It's hard to see how these would be harmful to kids”: Public library staff perceptions of child development and drag queen storytimes. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS/Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais1128