What’s Queer about Queer Performance Now?

When we ask ‘what’s queer about queer performance now’, the question is a nod to the past (and the influential issue of Social Text called ‘What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now’ from 2005)¹ but it is also perpetually in the present: what now? The edition of Social Text explored how queer studies might function in a specific political climate, at that time in response to shifts in identity politics and new approaches to queer epistemologies. We set ourselves and our contributors a similar challenge, but this time with a focus on theatre and performance: what is queer performance now, how do we recognise it, how do we make it, how do we talk and write about it and what might queer performance do?²

On the one hand we could answer the question of what queer performance is now: ‘the same as ever’. By this we might mean, at its most basic, resistance to the normative, in terms of gender and sexuality and dramaturgy.³ As part of this resistance, we see how queer performance’s best current manifestations can challenge and question histories (including queer histories), drawing attention to their fluidity and lack of stability, rather than solidifying them and sequestering queer narratives in the past. We might even claim that (in some parts of the world) queer performance’s interventions in gender, sexuality, and dramaturgy have had an impact on popular culture in a way that has queered cultural representation to a certain noticeable extent (we might look here, for example, at the advances around casting and representation across film and television and even awards’ criteria, for instance the well-publicised gender transition of Elliot Page and the television series Pose).⁴ However, we would not want to characterise all queer performance as done, perfectly formed, open, and resistive. We note that that queer performance does not appear across the globe in a consistent and coherent fashion, which maintains our position that queer writers, scholars, and performance makers can also fail queer’s resistive drive. This potential for failure can be observed through some queer performances’ hegemonic claims for normalisation and inadvertent or deliberate inequalities in access and representation. There are also some specifics of our recent and ongoing ‘now’ that most of us did not anticipate: the loss of IRL (in real life) performance, venues and community; a move to digital performance and a queer digital network. The impact on mental and physical health of seemingly endless fear, isolation, grief, loss, illness, and death brought about by the COVID pandemic is incalculable. At the same time, there is hope in the abundance – queer excess, if you will – of new modes of working and rethinking what is queer performance now. Some tropes we see emerging, and evident in the writings in this collection and our discussions with makers, include:

• an enhanced ability to collaborate and to disseminate and discuss digital work internationally; the audience has shifted and more have access, though this access can be unevenly present dependent on things such as location, access to technology and space in which to interact with on-line material.

• The engagement with digital forms and technology; the nature of the relationship with the audience has shifted.

• A new appreciation of slowness, with a deeper and extended focus on dramaturgical development; this is about the relationships between artists and between artists and venues or companies.

• Multi-format works: IRL works with digital contingencies. There is a certain multiplicity of thinking emerging from the requirement to be flexible and available all the time. It could be seen as queer in its plurality and fluidity. It’s also exhausting.

• Artists giving up the arts. It is too brutal and bewildering and, as most of us now know, resilience is a vastly overrated quality and one which is related to the neoliberal subject, who must produce. Resilience can fuck off, and slowness is a way of enacting that. Queer artists, along with the wider queer community, have been required to be ‘resilient’ for so long maybe the radical work now is to reject resilience and productivity. But that’s a complicated scenario, especially when economic survival is at stake.

• It follows that an ethics of care – both self-care and care for others – has emerged as vital to any performance worthy of the name queer and, likewise, as is in evidence in this collection, in any queer performance scholarship worthy of the name.

• And, in amongst all this, is humour, imagination, world-making, joy, resistance, solidarity and community. This too aligns with a queer legacy of addressing crisis through performance. We benefit from the legacies of AIDS activism.

It is these themes that perhaps add a new, or different, sense of what queer performance is now.

In compiling the journal issue, we have been faced with some parallel challenges: the diversity of queer performance histories around the world that, of course, cannot be mapped in a single issue or by one set of scholars; the inequality of queer experience transnationally; the need to go slowly as queer ethic in scholarship; the impact of illness, grief, and exhaustion. We have tried to hold onto this ethic of going slowly, but, inevitably, we still end up at a period of urgency to meet the (final, much-delayed) deadline for submission. This touches each of us differently too. It is important that these are understood not only as ideas, but as concerned with material realities – lives are lost or radically altered. Performance deals with affect and gives access to these experiences in ways that endlessly circulating numbers and data do not. And, in our experience, at difficult times like these, people cling more closely to their queerness and their community as sustaining and salving. This is particularly present where identities are legislated against, resisted in government education policy and at local levels in university departments and other education contexts. So, a loss of performance communities, experiencing live performance in rooms together, is keenly felt.

In some parts of the world where queerness has found space and rooted, such as in (much of) the Global North – Texas and other places in North America and Europe where the state has actively legislated against queerness notwithstanding – we frequently come up against the idea within and beyond the academy that queer is ‘done’, ‘over’. For instance, mirroring the (erroneous) logic that some places have gender equality and therefore we can ease up on feminist theatre, there is a perception in some places in the Global North that queerness has reached its goals – after all there is Pride Month, access to support information, charities, and government-supported organisations. We note that while some think queer is ‘done’, in other parts of the world queerness fights to gain a foothold. And across the globe, transphobia and homophobia is not diminishing; rather it is increasing in many parts – including places once understood as progressive.⁵ Of course, the statement that ‘we don’t need queer scholarship anymore’ is evidence of nothing so much as a colonial mindset that does not consider the way LGBTQI+ rights and ideas and lived experience of queerness emerge and play out in the many and various parts of the world beyond an Anglophone literary elite. Thus, we remain cognisant of and attentive to alternative understandings of sexuality and gender present in Indigenous communities and across the Global South that point to different queer histories and materiality and thereby pluralise queerness further.⁶ So, when we ask what’s queer about queer performance now, the answers we get are diverse, rich, and ever-changing. The ground we are making on is very slippery and performance must be agile, mobile, and responsive to quickly shifting political and social landscapes.

Where we have conversations about queer performance, and consider who gets to have them and how, the language we use matters deeply because these conversations are productive and feed community. What are the politics of producing and holding onto queer scholarship on performance in the academy, in a pay-walled journal, rather than taking those conversations to the streets and clubs? There are some brilliant examples of queer pedagogy happening in non-academic spaces: the talks that Dr Duckie (Ben Walters) takes out to working clubs and bars⁷; Queer History Club at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and other club venues in the UK.⁸ Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier have made attempts in this field while we wrangle this dilemma of the divide between academia and the clubs we (used to) frequent: with Feral Queer Camp we set out to open up discussions beyond the university campus and take a collective approach to how we identify and articulate what’s going on in queer performance.⁹ Queer cultural events, such as the Bangalore Queer Film Festival, have a curated space for queer performance and conversation, which enacts some of this alternative thinking, pedagogy, and ‘street scholarship’.¹⁰ In a different move, queer activism has made space within academia to archive and curate queer histories and performance cultures such as the Gay and Lesbian Archive in South Africa (GALA), which opens a platform for queer narratives and histories including performance cultures across the African continent and diaspora.¹¹

Awkward Bedfellows – Queer Theory and Performance

Another ethic that drives our work is the aim for research and writing on performance that takes a wide readership – and particularly queer communities – along with it. One of the great bugbears of the LGBTQIA+ community who sit outside of academia is queer theory/theorists’ use of obfuscating language, or ‘prissy incomprehensible imprecise gobbledygook’.¹² The argument here is that it is just annoying at best and, at worst, exclusionary – marginalising and alienating to many, while serving only the people who write it and the small, elite circle trained to read it. On the other hand, this complexity has been articulated as a queering strategy: it re-thinks language and syntax to find ways to articulate life beyond the cisheteronormative. Queer thinking’s radical sense of shaping new forms of emerging identities and resistances has, arguably, necessitated a complex relationship with language, which is used as a tool in this emergence. While academic obfuscation holds true and marks a particular privilege and hierarchy within the LGBTQIA+ community, it is also important to acknowledge the value of these interventions, which have produced space for queerness’ emergence as positionality. Nevertheless, in our work with queer communities working in and around queer performance, the academic DNA of queerness is never far from the discussion. Queer, particularly when it is conjoined with the word ‘theory’ (and performance/theatre) is often felt as exclusionary even when its content is working against that very thing.

In this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, we are primarily committed to a kind of writing that brings the reader along with it, whether or not they have a degree in performance or gender studies. We do not see it as a denial or diminution of academic rigour to make no assumptions about how much theory readers have managed to digest. So, uppermost in our endeavours with this edition were our efforts to keep intellectual rigour without obfuscation. We follow Matt Brim’s analysis of the assumptions that academic institutions make on the normativity of interacting with queer ideas in academic settings. In Poor Queer Studies Brim describes the journey the students he teaches take to get to the classroom, reading their journey as a manifestation of complex intersecting power dynamics. In order to feed their minds, the students wrestle with employment, food, care, and caring roles, poverty, precarity, and insecurity in multiple forms.¹³ Brim argues that ‘we might be more candid about the materiality of the production of all of our queer ideas’.¹⁴ This materiality has felt particularly palpable in this journal issue, where the context of writing and who is producing it has been at the front of our minds as we acknowledge that some of us work in tenured positions in elite institutions while others are subject to the precarity of fixed contracts and the casualisation of academic jobs. When we are working across so many geographical and cultural contexts, that each have histories and their own timeline, ‘now’ is inseparable from ‘where’: what’s queer about queer performance where you are? Time and space (those very axes that structure theatre and performance) are in interplay all the time across queer performance pedagogy and scholarship, but perhaps the pandemic, intersecting so profoundly with #BLM and #MeToo, amongst wider anti-colonial or decolonising movements, has made each of us more acutely aware of the material conditions that affect all of us so differently and within which we do, or do not, manage to produce scholarship.

Understanding that we benefit from our relative privileges, as do all makers and performers, we attempt to intervene or run interference within and beyond structures that conserve, in inequitable ways, a history of queer performance and what it can do/has done. This inequality in conservation is as much about paywalled academic journals as it is connected to the context in which work is presented. It is well understood that theatre can be experienced as exclusive.¹⁵ And even the work that is presented in pubs and clubs and non-theatre-y spaces also have their exclusionary dynamics – for instance work in galleries, clubs, cabaret venues, etc will each have their material and/or psychological barriers to access. Such an awareness of different privileges demands from us an ethical standard that enables meaningful engagement with others and their work, which can produce a precarious positionality of discomfort. This ethical position is no small part of the labour of the contemporary queer thinker, teacher and practitioner; often requiring a position that places the performance and its makers in challenging situations even in contexts that might apparently be seen to embrace such work. Thus, just as we refuse the ‘town and the gown’ distinction (who makes the gown?) and, with our ever-present queer intellectual sense, resist ideas that rest on apparently simple binaries, we likewise abandon the idea of a past/present dichotomy for working with the ‘now’ as messy and commingled with the past, futurity, and geography.

Ethics/care/slowness

As we note above, the COVID pandemic has done things with time. Has it slowed down or sped up? Why is it so hard to tell? We hear a lot of popular discourse about how 2020/21 and now 22 have merged into one big temporal blur. What has been clear for us in editing work from people and places experiencing the impact of the pandemic in hugely varying ways is that something shifted in this period where the work and livelihood of so many queer artists, and scholars, was put on hold. Conversations moved, in ways that seem more coherent and intentional than before, to how we take care of each other, and ourselves, in a time of cancellation. Live performance’s great singularity, that distinguishes it from other art forms, is the very fact that it is live. It happens in rooms with other people, often with talking – loud talking – even singing, or a bit of cavorting and touching each other. This is what has, likewise, rendered us so vulnerable to this pandemic, wherein the possibility of being in rooms together – rehearsal rooms and rooms we call theatres – has been pulled from under us. The editors of The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance note that: ‘if it was not already before, it is certainly now a crucial moment for conversations on radical care, healing, disability, queer community, and anti-Black and anti-trans violence’.¹⁶ They draw on queer of colour feminists (Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa) to insist that wellness and self-care are a social justice issue.¹⁷

Amidst the devastation we have seen a move towards development, of both artists and new work, relationship-building and inventive ways to share resources and capacities. For some, an enforced stoppage (where lucky enough to have government support) opened the chance to reflect on a toxic industry where poor labour practices and exploitation are taken for granted. In some queer circles, support strategies were mobilised to think collectively about how to sustain a queer performance community. For other artists, we know, or suspect, that there was greater isolation and the potential to make work – indeed to be an artist at all – seemed to simply vanish overnight.

Speaking Transnationally through a ‘Cultural and Citizen Subject’

An important line in thinking about queer performance now is also how transnationalism and the ‘glocal’ from a Global South perspective shifts queer performance and discourse.¹⁸ The glocal here refers to the attention given to specific local cultures and communities, in this case non-normative gender and sexual cultures, that make connections with a global and transnational queer identity and culture. Themes around physical safety (both political and personal) continue to mark the experiences of practitioners and scholars living and working in the Global South in a different way than those working in the North. While queer scholars and artists in both contexts are pushing boundaries (thereby often taking risks) and the political realities of the North are evidence of a regressive shift in parts, as noted above, the material political realities and administrative conditions continue to mark notable differences. In India, the shuffling back and forth in legal changes to the controversial Article 377, which came to symbolise an important step for queer rights in the country,¹⁹ and the more recent Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 have marked progressive milestones, but these remain at the level of basic minimums for survival. Nancy Nicol in Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope maps progressive shifts in the Caribbean, Latin America, and India, while accounting for the continuing dangerous struggle in many parts of Africa. We may glean that the Global South is just moving from or still wrestles with the question of criminality in queer living.²⁰ We can see the US context in the Roe v Wade case²¹ as an exemplary sign of the rollback of rights, which have documented impacts in queer communities.²² In the so-called culture wars this regressive shift is evident, in the UK context, in the government’s refusal to support trans rights by not supporting a full ban on conversion therapy.²³ Thus, we understand risk and its management in relation to making queer performance (and signalling queerness in a more general sense) is not evenly experienced and requires sensitivity to context – geographical, social, temporal – to understand its specific resonances for those managing their safety while making their work and the disparities within and outside the anglophone gay context.

These differences are embedded in discussions of de/colonisation and the potential usefulness of the glocal as framing tool when looking to contexts and laws. The question of criminality and queer engagement with colonial inheritances in the law, has produced important work such as Danish Sheikh’s plays in Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India²⁴ that includes scripts of the legal proceedings, memoirs and poetic philosophising. Likewise, Mojisola Adebayo’s acclaimed I Stand Corrected²⁵ deals with hate crimes in the South African context (which legally offers full rights to the LGBTI+ community) and weaves in ancestral afterlife meetings. Both these works point to a tension between law and culture with which the postcolonial subject grapples. A useful formulation of this decolonial tension can be described as the pressures between a subject thought of as produced culturally (a cultural subject, as it were) and a subject produced through citizenship in a location (a citizen subject).²⁶ In the context of the Global South, the cultural subject may describe a postcolonial practitioner and scholar grappling with the larger inheritances of indigenous/ancestral traditions, spirit, faith, embodied practices, cosmologies of knowing and being that are in some cases being reclaimed with critical reflexivity after years of colonial epistemic and cultural violence and erasure. Alongside this, the citizen subject is marked by struggles for legal change and rights-based activism. In terms of queer discourse, itself marked by humanist philosophies that accept paradigms of modernity (such as recognisable identity categories), a citizen subject is empowered and values personal dignity by holding governments accountable for human rights violations and inequalities, as Erdem Avşar writes in his article in this issue. The citizen subject grapples with the complexities of discrimination and power struggles within the Global South, such as those of caste, ethnicity, language, class, and religion. It is these sorts of tensions that layer the queer performances of practitioners from the South.

This idea of a cultural and a citizen subject may also be usefully applied to the Global North (although again we are weary of apparently easy binaries); for instance, in Australian society’s daily grapple with Indigenous rights and colonial theft – all socially aware artists, perhaps particularly queer ones, wrangle with this in every choice they make (venue, creative team, casting, material). The commingling, entangling, and articulation of the cultural and socially produced elements of a subject form a theme in queer performance, often where it happens in a colonial, post-colonial, neo-colonial, or settler colonial context.

Queer Fun

A lurking and underdeveloped area of discourse in our field is the place of queer fun.²⁷ We know we have it, and that, historically, queer people have mobilised fun and joy in response to persecution and hatred. In campery and disidentification, in the street actions of ACT UP to radical drag and queer cabaret and everything in between we find queer performance responding through joyful world-making moments (on which José Muñoz has written so eloquently²⁸). When we engage with queer critique as it appears in political discourse, we see it is built on resistance, refusal, and a demanding energy for rights and acceptance. However, when we see queer performance, even in the mode of refusal or grief, it produces something akin to joy in the sharing of experience with people we recognise as queer kin. This is an interesting and present tension in our work for this issue. We understand and have experienced the bonding joy that even the most challenging queer performance work can produce, but the critical tone present in reviews and scholarly analyses often does not follow this energy.

This quality in writing about queer performance leads us to ask, why is there so much critique and not enough joy in queer critical discourse? Here we do not treat critique and joy as mutually exclusive, indeed the opposite. In terms of thinking through where queer performance scholarship, and specifically this issue, sits in relationship to fun we might note that fun is harder to find in a pandemic – but not impossible. We understand that, in the work we see, joyful critique is ever-present, even in the deepest parts of pandemics, and joy still persists despite rising tides of violence toward queer and trans people. The challenge for us in the work for the volume was to mitigate against the smoothing over of joy as we produce critical discourse, understanding that studying queer performance often requires seriousness to be considered academically weighty. Of course, we want queer work to be taken seriously and its importance recognised, but alongside this equally we want to reflect some of the joy and resistive energy in the performers and productions present in this volume. It would be remiss of us, therefore, in this response to the disciplining of queer performance, not to finish this point about resistance and joy with: ner ner ner ner ner.²⁹

Performance Is a Choice to Act

Performance, as evidenced in almost all the work present in this issue, is a choice to act and to foreground the act as a political stance, as an invitation to encounter otherness, to deal with pasts and the offer of new futures. As Laine Halpern Zisman points out in this issue, the Canadian mediatised performance event Queer Pride Inside Cabaret demonstrates that doing performance even in the most accepting contexts can be challenging. The choice to act together to forge a platform and solidarity for queerness across various experiences of erasure and marginalisation continues to be a challenge. Performance offers the possibility for solidarity and continues to be what it can do in these contexts. For instance, across cultures, gendered street violence continues to find its place in performance work (such as The Pink Supper see pp. 44–60) or the mediation of hauntings from the past in performance offers space for anger, grief, loss, remembrance, and celebration (see Erdem Avşar’s contribution in this issue pp. 111–127). Queer performance scholars and queer practitioner-scholars also perform queerly in their writing. We can see how queer writing in performance is also a manner of doing queer thinking. Some texts in this issue offer different ways of queering academic writing. We are aware too of the obvious point that queer audiences already have experience of their queerness as they come to see queer performance. Where people are visibly queer as they come to the space, we often, though not always, see this too as a choice to act and connect. In some ways presenting as gender non-conforming in the street to get to a venue can take just as much courage – maybe more – as it does for a performer to enter the space to a welcoming audience. We return then constantly to the differing contexts in which queerness and queer performance happen and see these choices to act as material, embodied negotiations with heteronormative structures, across a spectrum from the most (apparently) open political contexts to environments of state-sanctioned homophobia and transphobia.

The Structure and Content of the Issue

Given the complex state of queer performance and its emphasis on surviving and thriving – a theme present in queer work before, during and after the COVID pandemic – we start this issue with Laine Halpern Zisman’s essay. The article explores the deep tensions in queer performance’s relationships with mainstream performance and cultural industries. Noting that it contains both the need to ‘fuck the system and actively acknowledge our complicity within it’ (p. 16), Zisman argues that queer performance work sets itself away from – or out of – the normative systems of performance work, whilst also being tethered to it – thereby being ‘in’ at the same time. The essay explores the ways in which this ethics of ‘in’ and ‘out’ functions, while articulating how antinormative queer performance practice finds space to express itself though forms such as Queer Pride Inside, a cabaret in Canada. Zisman complicates an easy binary, positing that queer performance can negotiate within the dominant and find a place to thrive without erasing or normalising itself.

Kamogelo Molobye’s essay follows to drill into the ways that queer performers negotiate this important tension of in/out through representational strategies in a specific cultural and geographical context. The essay focuses on underrepresentation and navigates religious anti-queer violence in the context of post-transition, post-apartheid South Africa. The article asks how South African queer theatre confronts the power systems and violent dominance that underpin the silencing of queer people in contemporary South Africa. By looking particularly at the work of Koleka Putuma, the paper suggests that queer performance offers a way to bring peripheral narratives into the centre, claiming space and resisting erasure. In Putuma’s No Easter Sunday for Queers, queer figures haunt the present in a dramaturgical strategy that Molobye suggests is best summed up by Nondumiso Msimanga, who writes: ‘being haunted is a matter of existential stakes. It is life or death in every sense, because even the loss of love can shatter your future and put the past in question in a way that makes everything in the present turn into a question’.³⁰

Nando Messias offers us a practice research reflection of their work The Pink Supper (2019). Chiming with Molobye’s contribution, Messias’s work engages with the past and love, connecting it to broader frameworks of power. It does this through the form of the essay too – Messias has an extraordinary capacity to produce critical writing that, though it works differently from the affect of the work in performance, carries an equivalent visceral engagement and emotional pull. In The Pink Supper they queer form, through an excess of pink and a disidentification with the ritual of a last supper, to mourn, memorialise, and rage against transphobia in Brazil through what they call ‘protest performance’. In part the work deals with the past and how it might inhabit the present persistently. In the essay, Messias works through a kind of translation, moving across their personal history of displacement and loss connected complexly with gender violence across time, continents, and contexts.

An affect of care emerges from Messias’ work that is connected with their commitment to the importance of making work in (or because of) the most violent of cultural-social contexts. Paying mind to the impact of the pandemic, Beck Tadman’s essay engages with performers, working through what practical and material realities they face to maintain their work. The discussion speaks to the ways that communities make work, while also articulating a critical framework set up to draw out key ideas of ethics and care. The paper is watchful to articulate ideas around care as conceptual, while also paying critical attention to the lived experiences of the performers they interview. Despite the consistent commitment to principles of care and ethics in queer performance communities, Tadman’s analysis is that this concern is not wholly present in critical work. The paper investigates these underexplored ideas, articulating how processes and communities matter in ways equal to the content of the queer work we see.

In some ways this negotiation of survival and care can be understood as a moment of resistance through separation or splitting off ‘in’ from ‘out’. Supraja Ramesh’s essay works through this notion of separation, articulating it via the idea of cleaving (splitting or severing), seeing it as a kind of becoming at an individual level. The essay does this through remembering the production Yavanavvanam (2018) and connecting it to a recent photo-performance (2021). On a broad scale the essay works through colonial inheritances and violences of local hegemonies operating through caste oppressions in India, where ‘one encounters legacies of erasure and oppression haunting the terrains of performance practice’ (p. 84). By working through the flux of performance’s inherent past and present-ness, Ramesh chooses to cut across the power structures by cleaving and writes this as queer becoming: splitting away as a resistance to enfoldment in this context becomes imperative because to be enveloped is to repeat a colonial energy, while also attempting to cleave through caste inheritances.

The survival of queer performers and performance is connected to care, then, be that via a small community supporting its cultural and biological health through grassroots organisation or by means of a national network set up to support, develop, and guide queer performers. Guilia Casalini’s essay examines queerness that works across contexts, exploring possibilities for queer feminist work from a transnational perspective. Again, there is a turn to the past; this essay, however, looks to the heritages of queer ideas rather than individual experience. By starting from a position that lays out the limits of queer ideas that do not acknowledge their feminist roots, the essay examines the work of Ghanaian transgender artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT]. The essay investigates how the artist deploys queer abjection as a resistance to LGBT neoliberal rights-based positions. Vitally, connected to this critical position around neoliberalism, Casalini pays close attention to the specific material geographical context in which the work happens. Casalini reads Fiatsi’s work as connecting this neoliberal-resistiveness to transversal queer African subjectivity.

A focus on past rejection and abjection as vital to the present by emphasising the connection to heritages of queers though performance-making and representational dramaturgical strategies is explored in the essay by Erdem Avşar. In the essay Avşar makes the point that haunting happens through both ideas and energies in performance. Writing on queer performance in Turkey, Avşar posits that it offers a counter to the nation-building, future-focused rhetoric of Turkish political life by populating the stages with queer ghosts. Rather than forge relentlessly forward, these ghosts refuse to budge until they can ‘seek redress, educate the living, and offer new social contracts to the queers of the present time’ (Avşar, p. 111). It is an exemplar of the way ‘queer performance is now’ is so inextricably interwoven with the past.

Likewise, it is interwoven with the future. The idea of haunting is in some way about the presence of an image rooted elsewhere, as an echo or a projection. Following this idea of the projection of an image from somewhere, or sometime, else, Joe Parslow takes us into the emerging field of queer digital, or queer artificial intelligence, performance, examining the way Jake Elwes’ work on queering datasets exposes the human biases that lurk behind algorithms. Elwes’ exploration of deepfake technologies through drag performance offers up some queer fun while making a powerful and urgent critique around diversity and access.

Our Backpages focus on queer artists and curators speaking about their practice.³¹ Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier’s contribution is a playful ‘recipe’ sharing how they build and sustain a project called Feral Queer Camp (FQC). This project sees the resources of the university turned to queer ends. Channelling queer fun, the form of the contribution is a ‘how to’ guide to making a FQC in other contexts. It is a ludic approach to communicating the ideas Campbell and Farrier embrace in their work, in a way that emphasises getting together to eat, chat and have fun.

Regan Michael Lynch’s work on party performance practices in Melbourne builds on ideas of disorientation, suggesting that performers enlist various dramaturgical strategies to disorientate their audience (or, more precisely, ‘the crowd’) as a political act. Through the performance strategies of defamiliarisation and disorientation, Lynch posits, these works engage with new ways of being in community and the world.

Stephen Greer interviews writer Jo Clifford, producer Annabel Cooper and director and designer Susan Worsfold about their programme of events (2019) to mark the 10th anniversary of Clifford’s groundbreaking trans work Jesus, Queen of Heaven. This allows for a consideration of intergenerational solidarity in trans performance in Scotland within an environment of growing transphobia and homophobia, and a recognition of what it means to be a trans playwright. Greer uses Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History to frame the discussion around injury and how, as queer people, we live with it, rather than ‘fix it’. This reparative approach is reflected in the intergenerational work being made as a response to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, ten years after it first premiered.³²

The Interventions on-line edition in partnership with this issue (https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/interventions/) offers audio and visual materials which afford direct encounters with queer practitioners and artist-scholars. It gives access to some of the works themselves, to queer practitioners talking passionately about their work and philosophy, and to poetic and playful ruminations on queerness. The edition includes an introduction by Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy, articles by Hongwei Bao, Íbrahim Halaçoğlu, Emma Lockhart-Wilson and Andrew Sutherland, as well as an expansive interview with Gemma Hutton and Greg Thorpe. Collectively, they open up imaginative queer worlds, enlist decolonial and eco-queer thinking and bring home viscerally the role and cost of care, ethics and kinship in queer performance communities.

As we draw this editorial to a close, we return to our founding question: what is queer about queer performance now? Ironically, we cannot give a straight answer (as you will have guessed); rather, we understand it as complex and deeply connected to who is asking the question and who is answering it, where they are and what time it is. That said, what has emerged from the work on this edition is that queer performance is as vital as ever, has now been around long enough to have a history, and that it is as vibrant, spirited, colourful, feisty, and productive as it ever has been. Mercifully, it maintains its energy to challenge oppressive systems through its persistent presence in performance-making the world over – and it does so with careful fun at its heart and a playful glint in its eye.

Notes on contributors

Alyson Campbell is an award-winning director, theatre maker and dramaturg whose work spans a broad range of companies and venues in Australia, the UK and the US over the last 30 years. Alyson is a Professor in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. Her research, artistic practice, teaching and activism converge around gender and sexuality, particularly queer performance and dramaturgies and contemporary representations of HIV and AIDS. She has written widely on these areas, most notably co-editing the collections Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave, 2016) with Stephen Farrier, and Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the 21^st Century (Palgrave, 2018) with Dirk Gindt. She now likes to write about feral pedagogies and is passionate about Feral Queer Camping.

Professor Stephen Farrier is Director of Research and Head of the Postgraduate School at Rose Bruford College, UK. His work focusses on queer performance, popular forms, queer histories and research ethics. Of note is his work with Alyson Campbell, particularly the edited volume Queer Dramaturgies, International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave 2016) and with Mark Edward the two-volume project Drag in a Changing Scene (2020 … 2022).

Dr. Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy is a Theatre and Performance Studies practitioner-scholar interested in bringing Performance as Research based creative writing, somatic work and queer embodied methodologies to interdisciplinary decolonial ocean research. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Studies, Mount Carmel College Autonomous, Bengaluru India, and a Research Associate at the Wits School of Arts, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published on PaR and decoloniality, Gendered Citizenship and PaR as Foresting Loss. She convened the International Federation of Theatre Research’s Performance as Research (PaR) Working Group between 2017–2021. She co-founded Scribe Rites, a laboratory based performance writing collective, and has been on the directorial board of The Institute of Leadership and Transformation in South Africa. She has taught in Drama and Performance Studies Departments in India and South Africa.

Acknowledgement

The guest editors would like to thank the Contemporary Theatre Review editorial team for their patience and generosity with us, over the extended time it took to put the issue together and its many delays. Working with scholars from around the world, we were acutely aware of the different ways we were feeling the impact of the pandemic: some of us were supported in steady jobs with salaries while others lost their work; at various times contributors in some parts of the world were dealing with grief and loss on vast scales while others remained relatively safe and protected. The global inequalities so starkly revealed by the pandemic were played out across the act of editing the collection: loss of friends or family, loss of jobs, poverty, instability and insecurity took their toll. We understood it as a queer ethics to go as slowly as we needed to in order to keep as many contributors as we could onboard, and regret the loss of the work of those who just could not survive and write a journal article, or make art. The forbearance of the CTR team helped us navigate this and we are profoundly grateful.

Notes

1. David L. Eng, J. Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?’, Social Text 84–85, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (2005): 1-17.

2. In this editorial, we use the word ‘we’ to denote all three editors. Where we refer to a specific editor, we have specified the person.

3. This concept is articulated in many places; see Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (eds), Queer Dramaturgies, International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

4. For instance, Pose’s cast members won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2019 (Billy Porter) and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama in 2022 (Michaela Jaé Rodriguez).

5. See for example Graeme Reid, ‘Global Trends in LGBT Rights During the Covid-19 Pandemic’, February 24, 2021. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/24/global-trends-lgbt-rights-during-covid-19-pandemic; (accessed March 21, 2022) Rebecca Greenfield, ‘LGBTQ Rights Regress in Unexpected Places Yet Advance in Others’, for the complex forward and back nature of LGBTQI+ rights, Bloomsberg, March 12, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-12/lbgtq-where-rights-are-advancing-regressing-around-the-world (accessed March 21, 2022).

6. See for instance: Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira, Queer in the Tropics, Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (New York City: Springer, 2019).

7. https://duckie.co.uk/dr-duckie (accessed January 18, 2022).

8. Queer History Club – Gender-bending Georgians at the RVT’, QX Magazine, October 17, 2019, https://www.qxmagazine.com/2019/10/gender-bendinggeorgians-at-duckiesqueer-history-club/ (accessed January 18, 2022).

9. See https://feralqueercamp.com/; Alyson Campbell, Meta Cohen, Stephen Farrier, and Hannah McCann, ‘Embracing Feral Pedagogies: Queer Feminist Education Through Queer Performance’, in Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies, eds. Penny Jane Burke, Julia Coffey, Rosalind Gill and Akane Kanai (London: Bloomsbury, 2022): 193-209; Alyson Campbell, ‘Queering Pedagogies. Running interference and going feral: twin strategies that work two ways – in to and out from the academy’, Theatre Topics 30, no. 2 (2020): 117–124. and in our short article/recipe ‘How to Cook up a Feral Queer Camp A recipe guide’ in the Backpages of this journal edition, pp. 149-51.

10. Sebastián Nadilo, ‘Bangalore Queer Film Festival, Asian Film Festivals, February 23, 2016, https://asianfilmfestivals.com/bangalore-queer-film-festival/ (accessed March 21, 2022).

11. Therese Migraine-George and Ashley Currier, ‘Querying Queer African Archives: Methods and Movements’ in Women’s Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3–4 (2016): 190-207.

12. Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), cited in Jason Schneiderman, ‘In defense of queer theory’. The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 17, no. 1, (2010): 11-15 (11).

13. Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies, confronting elitism in the university (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2020): 1-29.

14. ‘Q&A with Matt Brim’. Duke University Press blog, March 4, 2020, https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2020/03/04/qa-with-matt-brim/ (accessed January 31, 2022).

15. We can of course point here to works that seek to undermine theatre’s constant middle class concerns, for instance see the study in the UK context: Natalie Hart and Joe Winston, ‘“People Who Do Theatre Are a Bit Posh”: Examining the Impact of Class and Ethnicity on Engagement with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s Youth Theatre (The Young REP)’ in Education and Theatres, eds. Michael Finneran and Michael Anderson (Cham: Springer, 2009), 131-46.

16. Tiina Rosenberg, Sandra D’Urso, and Anna Renée Winget, ‘Introduction: Queer and Trans Feminist Performance’ in Tiina Rosenberg, Sandra D’Urso, and Anna Renée Winget, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), 1-27, 12.

17. Ibid., 13.

18. ‘Glocalisation’ is a term coined and introduced by sociologist Roland Robertson in a 1997 conference on ‘Globalisation and Indigenous Culture’ who claims that it was coined by Japanese economists. See Mike Featherston, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, eds., Global Modernities (California: Sage, 1995) and Kevin R. Cox, ed., Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (London: Guilford Press, 1997).

19. Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalised sodomy, and this was used to blackmail and harass gay men and the trans community. The struggle to have Article 377 repealed became a symbolic struggle for all queer rights in the country, though there is no provision still for important queer community rights such as civil partnerships, marriages, and adoptions. The repealing of Article 377 in 2018 has been widely referred to as the ‘decriminalising of homosexuality’. Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 is another important step for the protection of Trans rights in India where traditional trans communities such as hijras and aravannis, who face extreme physical and sexual brutality, now have legal recourse and safety. See Arvind Narrain, ed., Right to Love: Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India: A Transformative Constitution and the Rights of LGBT Persons (Bangalore: Alternate Law Forum, 2018). Also see transactivist and theatre practitioner A. Revathi’s solo play Vellai Mozhi for a provocative and moving account of trans living. An excerpt can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyrgetFrPAE (accessed October 19, 2022).

20. These refer to the 2018 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling that countered Jamaican laws that criminalise same-sex acts and cross-dressing in public and is applicable in all of the Americas under its jurisdiction. See Nancy Nicol, ‘Overview’ in N. Nicol et al, eds., Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope (London: University of London: 2018), 9-39.

21. The case focusses on abortion rights in the US. For an accessible history of the case, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54513499 (accessed October 14, 2022).

22. For example see: https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/icymi-human-rights-campaign-resources-on-how-the-end-of-roe-v-wade-impacts-the-lgbtq-community (accessed October 14, 2022).

23. See the British Medical Journal’s statement in support of a ban on conversion therapy for trans people: https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1453 (accessed October 14, 2022). In relation to LGBTQ+ education and the culture wars see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/culture-war-lgbt-lessons-relationship-education (accessed October 14, 2022) and https://theconversation.com/why-education-about-gender-and-sexuality-does-belong-in-the-classroom-102902 (accessed October 14, 2022).

24. Danish Sheikh, Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India (London: Seagull Books, 2021).

25. Mojisola Adebayo, Plays Two: I Stand Corrected; Asara and the Sea Monstress; Oranges and Stones; The Interrogation of Sandra Bland; STARS (London: Oberon Books, Bloomsbury, 2019).

26. Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy developed the idea of citizen subject and cultural subject while working across India and South Africa, exploring what decolonial subjectivity and its emergences looked like in these contexts.

27. Here we are thinking of the ASA 2014 conference theme, The Fun and The Fury – see Cynthia G. Franklin, ‘The Queer Art of Success: Lisa Duggan’s Fun and Fury’, American Quarterly 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 293-299. and organisations that put fun with serious community work, such as the many chapters of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

28. José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press: 2009).

29. Ner ner is a childlike, playful interjection normally shared amongst children – standing in for a kind of gloating or, as might be useful here, a sense of ‘told you so’, or simply, ‘so there!’.

30. Nondumiso Msimanga, ‘Foreword’, in Hauntings: an anthology of plays, ed. Katlego Chale (The Market Lab: Diartskonageng, 2021), 7.

31. The three contributions to Backpages described here are submissions curated by the co-editors of this edition, additional material was curated by Caridad Svich.

32. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).