I suspect that Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier might appreciate it if I opened this review by talking about (a) performance. However, to do this here would be to give less space and time to a discussion of Campbell and Farrier's richly textured and cannily organized volume. The recent edited collection privileges (in the best possible way) the initial, embodied, intimate encounter between the performance and its spectator, noting that ‘the performance event comes first: the articulation is what follows’ (p. 4). For Campbell and Farrier, one of the crucial points of this book is to consider what performance might be causing queer theory to think about or what being affected (‘being moved’ is a phrase that recurs throughout) by performance might mean, rather than how queer theory might be applied to or illustrated by performance. As Margrit Shildrick puts it in an illuminating interview with the editors, ‘It's when I start theorizing that you know something has really happened!’ (p. 273).

Queer Dramaturgies presents the reader with three thematic sections (each containing six or seven chapters), dealing broadly with space/nation, time/temporality and bodies in motion (in performance/around the world). The short chapter structure has the effect of guiding the reader quickly from context to context, country to country, performance to performance. Combined with many writers’ explorations of thick descriptions of live performance, I feel at times as if I am at the readerly equivalent of a particularly well-curated and thoughtfully celebratory cabaret, designed to move me as I learn and absorb. I'm in the Northcote Town Hall in Melbourne wearing headphones for Campbell's production of Lachlan Philpott's The Trouble with Harry, and I'm breathlessly watching Doran George's body disappear into brick in Elephant and Castle with Eliza Steinbock. I'm at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with Fintan Walsh watching THISISPOPBABY's Alice in Funderland, as ‘Ireland's vagrant queer performance culture . . . finally [finds] a home in the national theatre’ (p. 313). Mojisola Adebayo's brief queer reading of Muhammad Ali is unexpectedly touching. Nando Messias's triumphant return as a performer to a site where he experienced homophobic violence has me silently cheering in the library. Melissa Wansin Wong dissects Loo Zihan's re-performances of Joseph Ng's Brother Kane in a Singapore still struggling with LGBTQ rights. Amahl Khouri describes her 2014 play No Matter Where I Go as ‘the first queer Arab performance’ (p. 98).

In acknowledging the breadth of queer performative, spectatorial and scholarly experiences on display, the reader is also encouraged to remember that definitions are not always definitive, and examples can be purposefully slippery. Language throughout presents a fascinating articulation of the variegated terrain under exploration. Coined and refashioned terms – Adebayo's ‘Afri-Quia’; the use of ‘trans*’ throughout; T. L. Cowan's ‘phenomen@’ and ‘erotica-aesthetica-ethico-onto-epistemology’; Sean F. Edgecomb's ‘queer kinesis’ – pepper the volume, as do reminders and reclamations: of ‘sissy’ by Messias and ‘crip’ by Adebayo, Shildrick and Robert McRuer. The glossing of these terms is done joyfully and carefully, signalling that language is working hard for these scholars of queer performance.

Despite the editors’ well-placed concerns about the inevitable gaps or absences in their (in any) volume of this nature, the impressively diverse range of scholars and practitioners speaks to the ‘constant evaluation and proactive energy’ called for by Campbell and Farrier on this very topic (p. 18), as well as their plea for a shift from the cis-male, white voice which for them still dominates much of queer performance and theory in the field. Indeed, there is a constant, urgent thrum to much of Campbell and Farrier's framing of the book and its sections, reminding us to be mindful of essentializing, pigeonholing and assuming. Jill Dolan's moving afterword notes that the abundance of diverse voices populating the volume is testament to the international (yet local), intersectional queer dramaturgies being explored around the world in theatre, performance and theory. As Dolan simply states, ‘That variety gives me hope’ (p. 350).