Who Cares?: Ethics and Practices of Care and Making Change in Contemporary Queer Performance Production

Abstract

Queer performance has historically illuminated an imbalance of care for minoritarian concerns and fostered community connections for collective survival and resistance.¹

1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

This article interweaves theorisations by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and collaborators in the book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice²

2. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).

and draws upon interviews with key queer cultural producers, practitioners, scholars, and artists currently working in the UK to identify and theorise contemporary ethics and practices of care in their work. It reveals how queer performance practice attempts to address issues of ethnicity, race, class, disability, gender, and gender identity, tokenism and racial representation, access, class, (dis)ability, and trans-inclusivity in generative ways.³

3. Adam Carver, Queering the Sector: Meaningful Change, Meaningful Care, Conference programme, SHOUT! Festival of Queer Arts and Culture, Birmingham Hippodrome, November 8, 2019.

Considering the urgent need for material reconfigurations and diversification of the UK arts sector – both in response to and preceding the global COVID-19 pandemic – I argue that an ethics of care and orientation toward action can address ongoing issues around who and what is ‘made to matter’ in queer arts production. Contemporary queer performance praxis in the UK reaches further toward the margins to find new solutions to embed radical care in production practices. As philosopher Rosi Braidotti suggests, such work ‘is enhanced by the rejection of self-centred individualism … [producing] a new way of combining self-interests with the well-being of an enlarged community’.⁴

4. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 48.

Through foregrounding collectivity, community, care, and social justice the queer performance sector is well positioned to be at the forefront of wider cultural production trends, creating, and amplifying change throughout the sector and beyond.

Keywords:

• Queer performance
• ethics of care
• social justice
• intersectionality
• community

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisors Sarah Gorman and Ioana Szeman and peer reviewers for their constructive feedback. Many thanks to Jen Smethurst, Tracy Gentles, Gini Simpson, Jodie Worton, Kelsie Acton, and Maria Kinsella whose discussions with me early in the project were invaluable. Thanks also to the following people for being part of my network of co-conspirators and informants; Professor Brian Lobel, Professor Mark McCormack, Professor Fiona Measham, Dr Ben Walters, Dr Joe Parslow, Dr J, Adam Carver, Cassie Leon, Lucy Hayhoe, Tim Other, Krishna Istha, Amelia Cavello, Jamie Hale, Justin Hunt, Aakash Bharania, Ruby Glaskin, Seren John-Wood, Dot Egg, Nemo Martin, Whiskey Chow, Jacquelyn Leander, Megan Foster, Olivia Middelboe, Alex Karotsch, Andrew Ellerby, ShayShay Konno, Lilly Snatchdragon, Alisa James, Amy Mitchell, Emilia Nurmukhametova, Lucy Penrose, Maddie Mellon, Fredde Lanka, Dex Grodner and to the other queer cultural producers who elected to remain anonymous. Thank you all for your insights, amplified here.

Notes on Contributor

Rebecca Tadman (FRSA) is an artist, lecturer, cultural producer and previous Board Chair for Raze Collective, a charity that supports sustainable queer performance. A visiting lecturer at numerous universities, her work over the past 20 years applies critical theory transversally to connect social science and visual/performance art to cultural and educational institutions in the UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Notes

1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

2. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).

3. Adam Carver, Queering the Sector: Meaningful Change, Meaningful Care, Conference programme, SHOUT! Festival of Queer Arts and Culture, Birmingham Hippodrome, November 8, 2019.

4. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 48.

5. See Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson, eds., Performing care: New perspectives on socially engaged performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien, and Mark Taylor, eds., Culture is bad for you (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) and The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso, 2020) for recent examples of such discourse.

6. These factors, as well as the Conservative party’s 2015 return to majority government, the 2016 EU referendum vote to leave the European Union and US presidential election of Donald Trump feature regularly as cultural phenomenon that have contributed to a ‘crisis of care’ within publications quoted throughout this article.

7. See Emma Dowling, The Care Crisis: What Caused It And How Can We End It? (London and New York: Verso, 2021).

8. Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of capital and care’, New Left Review 100 (2016): 99–117 (99).

9. Harry C. Triandis, Individualism and collectivism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

10. See Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality (London: Repeater, 2019); Inna Michaeli, ‘Self-care: an act of political warfare or a neoliberal trap?’, Development 60, no. 1 (2017): 50-56; Nadia Urbinati, The Tyranny of the Moderns, trans. Martin Thom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

11. Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, ‘Radical care: Survival strategies for uncertain times’, Social Text 38 (2020): 1–16 (7).

12. Ibid., 2-3.

13. Caoimhe McAvinchey, ‘Clean Break: a practical politics of care’, in Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, eds. Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 123-138.

14. Ben Walmsley, Abigail Gilmore, Dave O’Brien and Anne Torreggiani, eds., Culture in Crisis: Impacts of Covid-19 on the UK cultural sector and where we go from here (Leeds: Centre for Cultural Value, 2022).

15. Mark McCormack and Fiona Measham, Building a sustainable queer nightlife in London: Queer Creatives, COVID-19 and Community in the Capital (London: Arts Council England, 2022).

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 22-4.

18. Hobart and Kneese, ‘Radical Care’, 1.

19. This research was approved by the University of Roehampton Ethics Committee (approval no. DTP 20 / 034).

20. See Raze Collective, ‘About’, https://www.razecollective.com/about (Accessed August 20, 2022).

21. Attributed to Paul L. Posner, the term pracademic refers to being both an academic and engaged practitioner in a field. See Posner, ‘The pracademic: An agenda for re-engaging practitioners and academics’, Public Budgeting & Finance 29, no. 1 (2009): 12-26.

22. Such that SHOUT! Festival of Queer Arts and Culture held a ‘Queering the Sector: Meaningful Change, Meaningful Care’ conference in November 2019.

23. See Carl Boggs, ‘Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power’, Theory and Society 4, no.3 (1977): 359–393.

24. Massimo De Angelis, ‘Preface: Care Work and the Commons’, in Care Work and the Commons, eds. Camille Barbagallo and Silvia Federici, The Commoner 15 (2012), xii-xv (xiii).

25. José Esteban Muñoz, ‘The Brown Commons’, in The Sense of Brown, eds. Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 2.

26. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 33.

27. Lauren Berlant, ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016): 393–419 (395).

28. Sarah de los Santos Upton, ‘The co-conspiring methodology: An invitational approach to action research’, Action Research 18, no. 3 (2017): 387–403; Beck Tadman, ‘Diffractive Co-conspiracy in Queer, Crip Live Art Production’, Performance Research 25, no. 5 (2021): 92-100.

29. Tadman, ‘Diffractive Co-conspiracy’, 95.

30. Karen Barad quoted in Martin Savransky, ‘Modes of Mattering: Barad, Whitehead, and Societies’, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 30, (2016): 3.

31. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 48.

32. Berlant, ‘The commons’, 395.

33. In the UK this is evidenced by the increasing removal of arts based subjects on secondary and post-secondary syllabi and the controversy caused by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s widely misquoted entreaty for artists and musicians to retrain in the wake of the pandemic, alongside a resurfaced image of the government’s 2019 Rethink.Reskill.Reboot campaign. See Charlie Duffield, ‘Rethink. Reskill. Reboot: Why Government retraining campaign advert from 2019 was pulled after backlash’, inews, October 14, 2020, https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/rethink-rekill-reboot-government-rertaining-campaign-advert-2019-quiz-backlash-pulled-714159 (accessed October 16, 2021).

34. Interview with QCP 22, January 27, 2021.

35. Interview with QCP 18, February 8, 2021.

36. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 33.

37. Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone (London and New York: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd., 2021).

38. Interview with QCP 7, November 17, 2020.

39. Nicholas Beutell, Katherina Kuschel Nicholas, and Maria-Teresa Lepeley, ‘Life–Work Continuum’, in Human Centered Organizational Culture: Global Dimensions, eds. Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Oswaldo Morales, Peter Essens, and Nicholas Majluf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 23-33.

40. Interview with QCP 2, July 8, 2020; QCP 6, November 12, 2020; QCP 9, November 23, 2020; QCP10, November 26, 2020; QCP 18, February 2020; QCP 27, August 8, 2020.

41. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 190.

42. Interview with QCP 7 and QCP 4, January 23, 2021; QCP 12, July 8, 2020; QCP 14 and 15, January 29, 2021; QCP 19, January 23, 2021.

43. Interview with QCP 18, February 8, 2020.

44. Fraser, ‘Contradictions of capital’, 99.

45. Ibid.

46. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 67.

47. Interview with QCP 4, January 23, 2021.

48. Interview with QCP 5, November 6, 2020.

49. Interview with QCP 3, September 1, 2020; QCP 6, November 12, 2020; QCP 9, November 23, 2020; QCP 10, November 26, 2020; QCP 19, January 23, 2021; QCP 22, January 27, 2021.

50. Interview with QCP 11, November 27, 2020; QCP 18, February 8, 2021; QCP 19, January 23, 2021; QCP 23, October 11, 2020.

51. In the changing landscape of post ‘Brexit’ Britain, the broad contexts of regional and national identity, migrant status, and the impact of the EU referendum on QCPs are beyond the scope of this article but are areas worthy of further investigation.

52. Interview with QCP 10, November 26, 2020.

53. Examples of open access repositories can be found at Producer Gathering, White Pube, Arts Admin, Shape Arts and Unlimited as well as on websites of individual QCPs.

54. Eleanor Formby, ‘Solidarity but not similarity? LGBT communities in the twenty-first century’, Project Report, (Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University, 2012), 9. Nevertheless, the term ‘community’ threatens to homogenise the diversity of those who identify as LGBTQIA+ and I concur with Formby that solidarity should not be equated with similarity.

55. Dean Spade, ‘Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and survival’, Social Text 38, no. 1 (2020): 131–151 (131); Care Collective, Care Manifesto; John Preston and Rhiannon Firth, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

56. See UK QTIBIPOC Emergency relief & Hardship Fund, https://uk.gofundme.com/f/nepjh-uk-qtibipoc-emergency-relief-amp-hardship-fund?fbclid=IwAR2jazagPnvxSZaDFLsh_IlwcrMkHdN5x44vN3ujDJMNRyIx9TIFWnOGBWQ (accessed April 20, 2021). The goal was £20,000 and the fund raised over £92,000 when it closed. See also Victoria Purcell, ‘A Complete List Of London’s Coronavirus Mutual Aid Groups’, The Resident, March 22, 2020, https://www.theresident.co.uk/london-culture-events/londons-coronavirus-mutual-aid-groups-a-complete-list/ (accessed August 10, 2021); Preston and Firth, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid.

57. ‘Bryony Kimmings and Brian Lobel Launch #GigAid to Support Artists Who Have Had Gigs Cancelled as a Result of Covid-19 Pandemic’, Theatre Weekly Press, April 24, 2020, https://theatreweekly.com/bryony-kimmings-and-brian-lobel-launch-gigaid-to-support-artists-who-have-had-gigs-cancelled-as-a-result-of-covid-19-pandemic/ (accessed October 9, 2021).

58. Wolfgang Tillmans’ Between Bridges 2020Solidarity project ran from April until August 2020, aimed at helping cultural and music venues, community projects, independent spaces, and publications existentially threatened by the global pandemic crisis. Over fifty international artists came together to design one poster each, which was offered on different crowdfunding sites as a gift for donations. Between Bridges printed and distributed posters to organisations in need free of charge. The posters were included in crowdfunding and other campaigns of 98 organisations in 21 countries. See: Between Bridges, http://www.betweenbridges.net/ (accessed August 10, 2021).

59. Harry Gay, ‘Queer People Have Had to Support Each Other This Year and Christmas Will Be No Different’, Novaramedia, December 25, 2020, https://novaramedia.com/2020/12/25/queer-people-have-had-to-support-each-other-this-year-and-christmas-will-be-no-exception/?fbclid=IwAR37FRZ2Duox5k9UiG39lyEQg8fYgKzw8KiM4lnCWvB7rkZUU3_ZxVGIJnM (accessed August 10, 2021).

60. Interview with QCP 24, November 23, 2020. Special thanks to Megan Foster and Jacquelyn Leander for their work co-conducting this interview.

61. QCP 9, correspondence with the author, May 10, 2020; QCP 9, correspondence with the author, March 13, 2020.

62. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 77.

63. Interview with QCP 2, July 8, 2020.

64. Interview with QCP 12, July 8, 2020.

65. Interview with QCP 2, July 8, 2020; QCP 23, October 11, 2020; QCP 27, August 8, 2020.

66. Devoted and Disgruntled, ‘Time for Respair: A conversation about theatre & the future’, Open Space online event hosted by the Battersea Arts Centre and Improbable, May 27, 2020, https://www.devotedanddisgruntled.com/blog/reports-from-time-for-respair-open-space-online-events (accessed August 15, 2021).

67. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 143 and Muñoz, Disidentifications.

68. Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. See Black Lives Matter, ‘About’, blacklivesmatter.com/about (accessed August 15, 2022).

69. Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Lucia Linsalata and Mina L.N. Trujillo, ‘Producing the common and reproducing life: Keys towards rethinking the Political’, in Social Sciences for an Other Politics ed. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 79-92.

70. Devoted and Disgruntled, ‘Time for Respair’.

71. Live Art Development Agency, ‘LADA Statement of Commitment on organisational change and racial equity’, June 23, 2020, https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/2020/06/23/lada-statement-of-commitment-on-organisational-change-and-racial-equity/ (Accessed July 25, 2021).

72. QCP 4, in discussion with the author, November 17, 2020.

73. Interview with QCP 28, January 26, 2021.

74. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care work, 162.

75. Care Cash involves allocating budget to be used by project teams and staff for their own care without explanation. Care Cash is known by several names, but the concept is commonly used in communities of practice that work around historic and ongoing discrimination, trauma, and violence. I first encountered the idea with this name through discussions with Tracy Gentles, Artistic Director of Something To Aim For.

76. Interview with QCP 4, October 5, 2020; QCP 6, November 12, 2020; QCP 7, November 17, 2020; QCP12, December 4, 2020.

77. Interview with QCP 14 and 15, January 29, 2021; QCP 19, January 23, 2021; QCP 28, January 26, 2021.

78. Interview with QCP 6, November 12, 2020.

79. Ibid.

80. DaDaFest, ‘Disability Arts and Access In the Digital Age’, online event, November 30, 2020. https://www.dadafest.co.uk/event/disability-arts-and-access-in-the-digital-age (accessed October 30, 2021).

81. Teresa Lam, ‘Pussy Palace Talks Diversity And Creating “Safer” Spaces To Party For Everyone’, HypeBae, April 9, 2017, https://hypebae.com/2017/4/pussy-palace-interview (accessed July 12, 2021).

82. QCP 16, correspondence with the author, February 4, 2020.

83. Interview with QCP 28, January 26, 2021.

84. QCP 29, correspondence with the author, February 3, 2021.

85. Interview with QCP 9, November 23, 2020.

86. Cassie Leon, ‘Commissioning, Collaborating And Supporting LGBTQ+ Communities with Raze Collective’, Take A Part, https://socialmaking.co.uk/commissioning-collaborating-and-supporting-lgbtq-communities-w-raze-collective/, (accessed August 5, 2021).

87. Cancel culture is ‘the withdrawal of any kind of support (viewership, social media follows, purchases of products endorsed by the person, etc.) for those who are assessed to have said or done something unacceptable or highly problematic, generally from a social justice perspective especially alert to sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues’. See Eve Ng, ‘No grand pronouncements here …: Reflections on cancel culture and digital media participation’, Television & New Media 21, no. 6 (2020): 621–627; Semíramis, ‘The Untold Truth about “Cancel Culture”’, Medium, April 10, 2019, https://medium.com/@vcasaisvila/the-untold-truth-about-cancel-culture-3675cac983c3 (accessed June 18, 2021).

88. Interview with QCP7, November 17, 2020.

89. Karen Barad, ‘Queer causation and the ethics of mattering’, in Queering the Non/Human, eds. Noreen Giffney and Myra J Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 311-338.

90. Interview with QCP 9, November 23, 2020.

91. Ibid.

92. Interview with QCP 7, January 23, 2021.

93. Interview with QCP 6, November 12, 2020.

94. Ibid.

95. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 76.

96. Care Collective, Care Manifesto, 57.

97. Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu, ‘The politics of care in technoscience’, Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 625-41 (625); Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things’, Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85–106. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For an excellent overview of the history of discourses of radical care and its multi-layered complexities, see Hobart and Kneese, ‘Radical Care’.

98. Ben Walters, ‘Our strength comes from our connection to each other: a conversation about resilience with Duckie employees Simon Casson, Dicky Eton and Emmy Minton’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 26, no. 1 (2021): 53-65 (53). Walters references Matt Jennings, Martin Beirne, and Stephanie Knight, ‘“Just About Coping”: Precarity and Resilience Among Applied Theatre and Community Arts Workers in Northern Ireland’, Irish Journal of Arts Management & Cultural Policy 4: 14–24.

99. De Angelis, ‘Care Work and the Commons’, xiii-xiv.