As of this writing, over 500 bills in the U.S. target LGBTQ+ rights (ACLU). This substantial increase in legislative threats and the anti-trans rhetoric that characterizes Donald Trump's Presidency indicate an exigency to forge new paths of queer resistance. In this essay, I examine the liminal performances of trans rhetors in rural/conservative U.S. state legislatures. I argue that liminal performance as a worldmaking tactic disrupts repressive social hierarchies by calling forth a rhetorical collectivity to witness the farce of rigid identity binaries and to imagine worlds otherwise. Liminal performance opens tangible opportunities for subversive and generative queer praxis.
Considerable interest has developed in 'digital resurrection,' the use of emergent technologies to bring back lost people, communities, and bodies of work. However, scholarship has not investigated how a digital resurrection operates dramaturgically. Foundational in theatre and performance studies, dramaturgical analysis illuminates how multiple choices contribute to a production's structure and the cultural function it fulfils. Such analysis is vital to an understanding of digital resurrections, because they are theatricalized encounters. By analysing two apps that resurrect Black and Indigenous communities, the article demonstrates how this emergent phenomenon can fulfil the cultural function of restoring autonomy to minoritised communities.
This essay politicizes the aesthetics of illumination, extrapolating from artistic reference to the sarcoma-softening lighting practices of a prominent gay bar during the U.S. AIDS epidemic and recontextualizing it into an era populated by near-compulsorily "PrEPared" Western gay men. Analyzing lighting as a performance of looking reveals that Enlightenment aesthetics perceive difference as only ever an obstacle to coalitionary politics. Revisiting the questions of queer representation and how difference might "come to light" in more compassionate ways, this essay "eluridates" an alternative to the current neoliberal mandate of freedom as experienced only in submission to elucidation, exposure, and transparency.
This short essay will underscore a dialogic emphasis when thinking about audience in performance, defining and foregrounding an audience dialogic response orientation and a format for post-performance engagement. The essay begins with a very brief reflection on the role of audience and general talk-back models in performance. Next, grounded in Rowe's Wave 1.12.22 performance at DePaul, the essay will discuss a dialogue response format, tracing its development and design. Finally, the essay will discuss the strengths and benefits of the format, working to remedy concerns and renewed energies in the lingering question of "why performance?"
In this Black feminist graphic Mystory (Ulmer), I draw on Julia Jordan-Zachary's notion of "swamp" to illustrate a cautionary swamp tale about the risk of soul murder that Black feminists face when we desperately try to home Black feminist performance without institutional support. Inspired by Esther Ohito's method of "Black feminist memory work," I consider how re-membering and reconnecting to my body through drawing invites me to mourn my own soul murder and grapple with disenfranchised grief. Throughout the embodied-reflexive drawing process, I explore Ohito's big question: what does it "mean and require to be human/e" in the academy?
In this autoethnographic essay, I draw from Black feminist thought and a hooksian conceptualization of homeplace to develop home training both as a public performance of respectable blackness and as a defiant reclamation of blackness - in body and thought - in white-oriented public institutions, such as the academy. With both deployments, I address Black beingness "in the home" and "at home" (i.e. comfort). This essay contributes to Black performance studies by further illustrating how the performances and communication/cultural practices Black scholars are taught in our private and personal lives influence how we show up in our public and professional lives.
In this article, I illustrate the imaginative and transformative possibilities of performing diary comics as "home/work." I situate diary comics in Black feminist performance to demonstrate how diary comics can function as Black feminist praxis, testimony, and a site for performative inquiry and worldmaking. Additionally, I provide a visual step-by-step guide to imagining liberated futures or "Gutter Futures" through diary comics for you to perform alone or in community spaces. I argue that if we imagine, we can become.
In this essay, we engage in a roundtable discussion to explore how we each home Black feminist performance in our work. We offer "homing" as an organizing concept. It does dual work. First, homing recalls a placemaking practice or a praxis of becoming and belonging using the knowing-doing body to create, disrupt, or transform space. Second, homing denotes a return to radical joy and make-do pragmatism rooted in Black feminism that relies on the knowing-being body to analyze aesthetics and to point to performative possibilities for social change. We organize homing into three sections: Homeplace, Homework, and Homebody.
In this article, I unpack Black feminist performances of home within the context of transnational migration. Sifting through boxes of memorabilia during a relocation that rekindles post-migration nostalgia, I respond to the visceral call of home. Attuned to the performative nature of "homing," I conceptualize soulscaping as affective and imaginative spaces that mediate the movement between being and yearning. Through soulscaping, I explore how homing becomes an embodied practice of self-definition, empowerment, and connection. Using poetry, I move between geographical states and states of home life, reimagining home not as a fixed place but as ongoing performances of belonging.
This essay forwards the concept of auto-grafting as a performative, narrative strategy that communicates traumatic excess or that which cannot be captured by traditional narrative methods. In analyzing how survivors of sexual violence use Medusa's rape narrative through Medusa tattoos, I argue that auto-grafting pluralizes trauma narratives, emplaces trauma survivors in a network of relation, and sustains silence that allows survivors to navigate traumatic incommunicability and precarious visibility politics. As such, auto-grafting attends to the limitations of narrativizing trauma by rejecting coherence, linearity, and a singular narrator.
Contributors to this essay embrace a collaborative, dialogical approach to writing while analyzing the processes and outcomes of two undergraduate solo performance projects. Under the umbrella of critical performance pedagogy and queer intimacy, and via access to interdisciplinary ways of knowing, this essay immerses readers in a campus world that created the conditions for these two projects to be born and shared. Implications for the advisor/professor-student relationship, as well as intersections of creative process and cultural space, are discussed.
This letter positions the digital realm as a Black feminist homeplace: a space of survival, joy, and (re)imagination. Digital homeplaces function as interventions that resist erasure, craft belonging, and generate archives of becoming. The footnotes operate as a parallel performance, directing readers to engage critically with the embodied dimensions of Black feminist praxis. While digital homeplaces carry these risks they also sustain autonomy, offering possibilities that traditional academic and performance venues often constrain. By framing digital Black feminist practice as a response to these shifts, this letter lingers in tension as the very condition of Black feminist digital life.
Based on our experiences and archives, we examine how creating giant puppet shows fosters community, creativity, and social justice. We analyze how backstage processes (e.g. building puppets and scripting stories) facilitate community building and collective identity. We also reflect on how the scripts and music project politicized counternarratives that facilitate emotional experiences and consciousness raising. Situating our paper in scholarship on puppetry, we support a holistic approach that considers sociality, narrative, materials, culture, politics, and emotion. We conclude by exploring the limitations and benefits of our own productions and the potential of political puppetry in the contemporary world.
This essay responds to Kasey Lynch's performance "Some(where?) That's Green" and explores the ways in which her intersectional eco-feminist lens can give voice to layers of misogyny in musical theatre characters and spaces. Lynch's autoethnographic journey with her character Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors weaves performance studies alongside the theatre canon, sharing space, but not diffusing the self that brought the body to the character on stage.
This artist statement accompanies my autoethnographic script "Some(where?) That's Green." Here, I provide a history of the musical Little Shop of Horrors, as well as my impetus for re-performing it using posthumanism and ecofeminism theories. I consider the question that continues to nag me as a feminist artist-citizen: why does engaging with the genre of musical theatre matter in this current world moment marked by health crises, systemic violence, and climate tragedy? Re-performing Audrey in Little Shop provides clarity for me in terms of how, and why, we continue to make seemingly frivolous art at "the end of the world."
