Staging Queer Feminisms: Sexuality and Gender in Australian Performance 2005–2015 traces the powerful revolution in the marrying of theatre, politics, gender and sexuality on Australian stages to point the reader in the direction of significant changes taking place, but too often dismissed or not embraced by the main stage and commercial theatre sectors. French, in her introductory notes to the text, makes it very clear that the book is not a chronological survey of Australian feminist and queer performance in recent decades. Rather, she has provided in-depth analysis of select independent artists and performance companies, with analytical insights into the developments and shifts in the field of what French calls ‘queer feminisms’, that ‘offers a productive intersectional methodology’ (p. 15). Most of the artists and companies are situated in Melbourne, with three artists/companies – Moira Finucane, Brown Council and Hot Brown Honey – often programmed in international festivals and gaining audiences across the local and global sectors. The selection also represents a diversity of art forms including cabaret, burlesque, drag, performance art, theatre and contemporary art, as well as works that engage with live and digital performance forms and technologies. By casting the net wide and representing a plethora of art forms and styles, French is embracing the manifesto of the performance makers in the book, that sees theatre and performance as neither one thing nor the other, but both things simultaneously. It is essentially a liminal practice that seeks, at least for the artists and companies selected, to be in the business of ‘producing counter-cultural works that stood in contrast to the political and aesthetic agendas of the major state-funded theatre companies’ (p. 4).

Before leaping into the seven case studies, French defines key terms in the Introduction, and marks out the historical landscape of Australian feminist theatre and queer performance in terms of significant practitioners and approaches – from the late twentieth century through to the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. French pays particular attention to the period between the 1970s and the mid-2000s, when women playwrights and women's stories became more prevalent. Nonetheless, their work is still not commonplace in major Australian theatre companies where the dead white male is still in the ascendant. Importantly, French notes that scholarly attention to Australian queer theatre is lacking and to date there has not been a comprehensive study or survey of the field despite a number of Australian theatre scholars and artist–scholars actively researching and making theatre in this area.

The originality of the text can be found in French's adoption of the term ‘queer feminism’ and its application to the selected case studies. French borrows and repurposes the idea from Annamarie Jagose's article ‘Feminism's Queer Theory’ (2009), and argues that feminist theory and queer theory have a symbiotic relationship, and the ‘capacity to challenge the male/female binary to “queer” gender by viewing it as multiple and indeterminate’ (p. 15). Thus the case studies need to be read as sitting within a contested field where notions of theatre, politics, gender and sexuality are individual, situated and fluctuating rather than universal and homogenized. Essentially French's text investigates intersectionality in a live performance context. The live embodiment of non-binary space is one in which female performers and performance makers use the theatrical form to draw attention to the ways that, as Carissa Lee suggests, the ‘gender-based discrimination, and oppression a woman may experience can be compounded by her race, socio-economic status, sexual orientation and more’ (‘Why Australian Theatre Needs Intersectionality’, 2018; https://witnessperformance.com/essay-australian-theatre-needs-intersectionality/).

French provides a much-needed contemporary treatise on Australian queer feminist performance and sketches out the requirement for greater scholarly interrogation of the practice of feminist and LGBTQI theatre and performance makers. The work of the artists and companies chosen provides countercultural narratives and diverse ideological frameworks that take readers on a journey of critical engagement with political and social issues pertinent to this current place and time where difference is celebrated and venerated. The text talks about the kind of theatre that, according to Hot Brown Honey performer Bryony Kimmings, ‘is the beginning of a massive movement, or it's a subversion of knowledge that you hold dear, or a mighty sucker punch to the things you thought theatre was capable of’ (https://www.hotbrownhoney.com).