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.
