On the Edge: Straddling (Anti)normativity in Queer Performance

Abstract

In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed explains that precarity is akin to a vase on the mantelpiece. If it were pushed even slightly, it would fall off the edge. Existence on that edge, Ahmed explains, is what we allude to when we discuss precarious populations. Patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia are violent forces. They threaten to push us over the edge. Queer performance often begins in this in-between state on the mantelpiece, not quite fallen, not quite stable, negotiating, and straddling a balance between holding on to a fragile state and falling off the mantle entirely. In this article, I analyze the Queer Pride Inside Cabaret (June 2020), the first official partnership between Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the largest and longest running queer theatre in the world, and the CBC, a Canadian federal Crown corporation and national public broadcaster. In considering the mainstream producers and the radical queer artists showcased, I refuse a simplistic antinormative/normative binary in queer performance in Canada and make space for accessing resources from the mainstream, while rejecting inequitable systems of oppression. If queer theatre is intended to break down ingrained static and naturalized assumptions of everyday practices, how do we understand queer performance through contradictions and incoherence? Can we simultaneously fuck the system and accept our complicity within it? Complicating the unique and diverse ways artists opt-in and out of mainstream queer presence, this article looks at creative practices that challenge and promote continuing legacies and failures of queer performance in Canada.

Keywords:

• Queer theory
• queer theatre
• antinormativity
• performance studies

Notes on Contributor

Laine Halpern Zisman is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy. She is a queer performance, media, and communications scholar and has published and taught on a range of topics related to queer theatre & media, activism & intergenerational trauma, and critical queer feminist theory. Laine is also a queer doula (@QueerConceptions) who specializes in LGBTQ+ advocacy, education, and support navigating family-building journeys.

Notes

1. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 238.

2. Without universalizing an imagined ‘we’, I use the term throughout this article, as Ahmed aptly describes in Living a Feminist Life, as a ‘hopeful signifier of a feminist collectivity’ (2). A collective ‘we’ which is always in a process of creation, exploration, and the critical reflexive recalibration that is necessary for accountability towards inclusion and systemic change.

3. Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

4. Madhavi Menon, ‘Universalism and Partition: A Queer Theory’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26 (2015): 117-140 (119).

5. This event occurred online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While such a performance puts pressure on conventional definitions of theatre, I opt not to engage these discussions in their entirety because they are outside of the scope of this article. For more on the impact of the mediatization of queer performance, read: T.L. Cowan, ‘Re-mediating Trans- Feminist and Queer Performance Art’ in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History ed. Kathryn Brown (New York: Routledge, 2020), 155-166.

6. Paul Halferty, ‘Queer and Now: The Queer Signifier at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’. TRiC / RTaC 27, no. 1 (2006): 123-154 (124).

7. Moynan King, ‘The Foster Children of Buddies: Queer Women at 12 Alexander’, in Theatre and Performance in Toronto: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, ed. Laura Levin (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011), 191–202 (196)

8. Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out; Alexis Shotwell, Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, ‘Queer theory without Antinormativity’, differences 26, no. 1 (2015).

9. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 9.

10. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o. ‘Introduction: Theory in the wild’, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 453-464 (454).

11. Andrea Smith. ‘Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2010): 41-68.

12. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck and Angie Morrill. ‘Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy’, Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 8-34.

13. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

14. Andrea Smith, quoted in Arvin, Tuck and Morrill, ‘Decolonizing Feminism’, 24

15. Ibid.

16. José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 11.

17. Ibid., 91

18. Ibid., 95

19. David L. Eng and Jack Halberstam, ‘Introduction’, in What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?, eds, David L. Eng and Jack Halberstam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-17 (3).

20. Cameron Greensmith and Sulaimon Giwa, ‘Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler /homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013): 129-148 (132).

21. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 238.

22. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color and The Performance Of Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31.

23. Ibid., 1.

24. Ibid.

25. Peter Knegt, ‘Burlesque troupe Les Femme Fatales are celebrating Black and Indigenous Bodies like Nobody Else’. CBC Arts, August 14, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/arts/burlesque-troupe-les-femme-fatales-are-celebrating-black-and-indigenous-bodies-like-nobody-else-1.5686463 (accessed September 23, 2022).

26. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 1.

27. Teiya Kasahara, https://www.teiyakasahara.com (accessed June 19, 2021).

28. Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野, The Queen and Me Promo Trailer. YouTube, February 3, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txyMrb818aI (accessed May 24, 2021).

29. Canadian Opera Company, ‘Gender & Opera | COC in Conversation’ YouTube, March 6, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOA6P8kC4Kk&t=4450s (accessed May 24, 2021).

30. Gay Jesus quoted in Peter Knegt, ‘“A call to arms in the form of a prayer”: Drag king Gay Jesus urges us to protect the marginalized’, CBC Arts, July 31, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/a-call-to-arms-in-the-form-of-a-prayer-drag-king-gay-jesus-urges-us-to-protect-the-marginalized-1.5667848 (accessed April 29, 2023).

31. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 133.

32. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 2.

33. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, ‘Introduction’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds. The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1-21 (8).

34. Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz differentiates a capitalist investment in empty hope ‘a mode of hope that simply keeps one in place within an emotional situation predicated on control’ and educated hope ‘a certain practice of hope that helps escape from a script in which human existence is reduced […] To want something else, to want beside and beyond the matrix of social controls that is our life in late Capitalism’. Lisa Duggan and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue’, Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2009): 275-283 (278).

35. Ibid., 275.

36. Ibid., 277.

37. Peter Knegt. ‘This Pride, Come Inside for a Digital Queer Cabaret Unlike Anything Else’. CBC Arts, June 22, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/arts/this-pride-come-inside-for-a-digital-queer-cabaret-unlike-anything-else-1.5617476 (accessed September 23, 2022).

38. Broadcasting Act. Legislative Services Branch, Consolidated Federal Laws of Canada. July 1, 2020, https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/b-9.01/ (accessed May 6, 2021).

39. CBC Mandate, CBC Radio, https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/vision/mandate (accessed April 15, 2021).

40. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 39.

41. Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 148.

42. Jody Berland, ‘Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada’, University of Toronto Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1995): 514-525 (515).

43. Jody Berland, ‘The Politics of the Exasperated: Arts and Culture in Canada’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 33, no.3 (2007): 24-30 (26)

44. Shotwell, Against Purity, 6-7.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laine Halpern Zisman

Laine Halpern Zisman is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy. She is a queer performance, media, and communications scholar and has published and taught on a range of topics related to queer theatre & media, activism & intergenerational trauma, and critical queer feminist theory. Laine is also a queer doula (@QueerConceptions) who specializes in LGBTQ+ advocacy, education, and support navigating family-building journeys.