Amelia Jones’s inventive new book In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance investigates the connections between queer theory, gender performance, and performativity by historicizing concepts in postwar US‐American society, intellectual thought, and art/performance practices. Each chapter is centered around a pivotal concept related to queer performance, such as “performativity” and “trans.” Within each chapter, Jones foregrounds artistic practices “ignored or marginalized at the time of their expression and in these genealogies of queer and performance discourses because of their subcultural assertively non‐normatively raced and classed, and/or extreme nature” (3). In Between Subjects crucially points out the limitations of queer performance theories as “US‐based” and “normatively white, cosmopolitan and urban, often male” (2). Taking into consideration race, ethnicity, class, and nationality, the book carefully develops “a mode of relationality” that accounts for the “contingent and intersubjective nature” of “understandings and experiences of gender/sexuality” and offers a reevaluation of works of performance art and the meanings and values ascribed to them (27).

Since the 1980s, performativity has been widely considered an intrinsic attribute of queer performance. Jones traces the theoretical development of performativity from J.L. Austin’s notion of speaking as doing to Judith Butler’s and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s suturing of queerness to performativity. Parallel to this theoretical exploration of performativity, Jones traces how the energies of the concept were already being actualized in visual art practices before it was expressed by Austin in his 1955 lectures, How to Do Things with Words. Considering John Cage’s Theatre Piece No.1 and 4’33" in 1952 and Allan Kaprow’s ideas of processual art, for example, Jones points to the emergence of a new mode of “art as process” (56), which was performative in its opening of art‐/meaning‐making to process, temporality, and the interventions of the spectator (57). At the same time, Jones notes the limiting focus on white male artists and elaborates the performative aesthetics of Black artists during the Black Arts Movement, which both activated and enunciated “their embodied empowerment in the public sphere” (44).

The discussion of performativity brings Jones to an examination of relationality as a closely associated concept circulating in social sciences and artistic discourses of the 1950s and 1960s. Jones highlights Erving Goffman’s contribution as especially foundational given his articulation of relationality as “always already raced, gendered and otherwise linked to charged identities” (102). In tandem with the theorization — within the social sciences — of the relational self, Jones notes that relationality has also been enacted by such artists as Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, VALIE EXPORT, and Nao Bustamante. By mobilizing their bodies to generate “a relational mode of encountering,” these artists redefined art “as a social situation involving participation such that meaning, value and even subjectivity are constituted relationally” (109). The book also historicizes the connection between the emergence of relationality in the arts and social sciences with “the rise of consciousness about identity and structures of selfhood as articulated in relation to otherness” (84) enunciated in anticolonial and civil rights movements.

In her examination of theatricality, Jones proffers an investigation of the interrelation between the theatrical and homophobia in 1960s discourses on philosophy, theatre, and art criticism and practices. Although deployed by performance and queer theorists in a “radically positive” way in the 1990s, theatrical self‐presentation, Jones argues, was saturated with “homophobic and misogynistic accounts” (132). Whereas white, straight males were seen to perform a real or authentic masculinity, the artificially theatrical self‐presentation of queers was cast as feminine, gay, effeminate, and nonwhite. While articulating how “the theatrical mode of drag” was usefully deployed by artists such as Jack Smith to denounce “claims to masculine privilege” (139), Jones also insightfully points to the racial dynamics of drag culture in queer artists’ appropriation of Latinx and Asian cultures.

In the next chapter, “Queer,” Jones discusses the concept of queer in its heyday of the late 1980s and 1990s. She explores the “lingering essentialisms, whiteness and male privilege” (188) accompanying the performativity of queer. Tracing queer theory back to white‐male‐dominated AIDS activism, Jones argues that the “liberalist discourse” (206) of gay male partying, street protest, and political activism engendered, as well as limited, the theorization of queer as necessarily subversive. For Jones, the subversive mode of queer crystalized by Butler’s drag queen theory presupposes “a norm of gender” and indicates the queer gender and sex as “an oppositional anti‐norm” (215). Jones takes up instead Sedgwick’s idea of “queer as an ‘open mesh of possibilities’ open to any subject” (223). Here, she analyzes trans artist Zackary Drucker’s performance The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (2008–09) to develop a notion of identification as “reciprocal and mutable” (228).

The last two chapters focus on Pasifika and Ma\ori cultures as well as trans performance in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These comprise the book’s most textured and vibrant arguments on the limits of US‐based understanding of queer performance. Discussing the ways in which the Ma\ori incorporate distant, powerful people (sometimes white and unconnected by genetic ties) into their whakapapa (genealogy), Jones interprets Ma\ori layering of genealogies as an indication of “a non‐European concept of connectedness” from which Ma\ori derive their sense of “emplacement” and “identification” (261). Inspired by the wisdom of whakapapa, Jones conducts a “performative analysis” of her own privilege as descendent of missionary colonizers, and questions whether her own concept of self is “untainted by colonialism” (262).

Further exploring gender‐liminal performances, Jones turns her attention to Auckland Pride week and, specifically, to FAFSWAG, a queer Pasifika performance collective. Jones notes that FAFSWAG has reframed voguing culture into “a model of self‐empowerment” (302) by enacting it through “indigenous/Ma\ori [and Pasifika] modes of bodily comportment” (320). For Jones, FAFSWAG’s appropriation cannot be understood as a “simple extending or mimicking (without change) [of] US forms of drag queenery or voguing culture” (312), since it incorporates and performs “the different valences of time and space (ta\ and va\)” (312) that inform Ma\ori and Pasifika ways of living and viewing the world. Different from the teleological, progressive, linear mode of Euro‐American cultures, ta\‐va\ indicates an oceanic, recursive mode of understanding history and one’s place in it.

In Between Subjects provides a much‐needed genealogy of queer performance that challenges the critical and artistic discourse dominated by white, US male artists and thinkers and offers a more diverse and dynamic understanding of both queerness and performativity. In this account, however, lesbian artists’ participation in this history and discourse is surprisingly unaddressed. Nevertheless, Jones offers new pathways of thought for graduate students and scholars pursuing the ongoing theorization of the intersections of gender, queerness, race, nationality, and performance.