The Queer Futures working group had its first formal meeting at the International Federation for Theatre Research's annual conference at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2010.Footnote 1 That year those gathered decided on our group's name, mindful of queer theory's temporal turn, but more fundamentally hoping it would signal a commitment to fostering queer research within IFTR for years to come.Footnote 2 While some of us working on queer theatre and performance projects had found supportive homes in other working groups in the past, there was a sense among the founding members that a working group specifically dedicated to queer research was long overdue, in order to adequately respond to the range and complexity of queer practices, theories and methods that we found ourselves grappling with. Although we were aware of a sense within certain sectors of the academy that queer theory's moment had passed, this was not entirely consistent with our personal and political beliefs, or scholarly pursuits. This conviction has since been vindicated by the growth and activity of the group.
As founding convenors, we have compiled this forum to profile the current research of some of the members and collaborators of Queer Futures; to highlight urgent subjects, questions, theories and methods; and to document the queer interventions being made in contemporary theatre and performance studies. Contributions focus on issues including cultural imperialism and translation; HIV, AIDS and performance; queer practice as research; trans and solo performance; partnership rites and ‘post’-lesbian practices; and interactions between embodied and virtual contexts. These projects represent a broad geographical spectrum, though our ambitions to extend the working group's focus beyond anglophone and Western cultures have yet to be realized, and therefore this will be a key aim in coming years.
Many articles explore queer theory and practice's productive intersections across age, class, dis/ability, gender, sexuality and other identity categories. For instance, queer cross-cuts national identity in Bryce Lease’s, Dirk Gindt's and Ben de Witte's case studies. Lease's opening contribution discusses a collaborative project that he leads, which aims to research, document and disseminate the archives of South Africa's Spring Queen and Miss Gay Western Cape pageants. Lease's piece highlights the queer dimension to these pageants while also contending with the problems of deploying Western understandings of gender and sexuality to understand this cultural context. Gindt similarly warns of the importance of paying attention to national and regional specificity, and the dangers of measuring all queer culture against scholarship largely emerging from the United States. His project on performance and HIV and AIDS in Canada insists on the importance of not ignoring this important part of queer culture that is often relegated to the past, even though it is an urgent part of our present and future. Also grappling with issues of cultural translation, de Witte's analysis of an early twentieth-century Argentinian play illuminates the value of queer theories’ contemporary interests in historiography and temporality. His case study of José González Castillo's Los Invertidos (1914) interrogates class, realism and theatricality to make an elegant argument about visibility and, ultimately, to insist on a (queer) history of transculturation.
Alyson Campbell and Steve Farrier explain and argue for the particular importance of queer practice as research (PaR) in the academy. They suggest that the focus on embodied, erotic knowledge characterizing this approach often makes for what looks like a messy methodology; this messiness, Campbell and Farrier argue, is a strategic mode that resists more traditional approaches and the academy's privileging of ‘hard knowledge’. As a trans performer who researches the tropes of solo queer performance though practical and theoretical inquiry, Lazlo Pearlman is an exemplary representative of queer PaR. Although queer solo performance has been historically defined by confession and self-identification strategies, Pearlman argues for a new mode that involves resistance to ‘truth-telling’. He does so by laying claims to the value of what he calls ‘dissemblage’, revealing how this operates in his own practice. While most of the authors deploy ‘queer’ as a shorthand for a broad range of subjects and practices, Pearlman prefers LGBTQQIA – lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual – to explicitly account for constituent groups. Stephen Greer also analyses solo performance practice and its interpretation, exploring the ways in which queerness has become aligned with ‘exceptional’ difference. Thinking through an eclectic range of performers, including David Román and Amy Lamé, Greer explores the possibilities and ramifications of locating the power of the queer performer in her semblance rather than in her radical difference.
As with Campbell, Farrier and Pearlman, the erotic also concerns Sue-Ellen Case in her reflection on the history of queer research within IFTR, and contemporary queer culture more broadly. Case draws our attention to what she experienced in the past as a discomfort with lesbian politics within strands of feminist scholarship, while also lamenting what she sees as the banalization of queer projects under the normative drive for same-sex civil partnership and marriage. Sarah Mullan illuminates further tensions surrounding lesbian subjectivity in relation to queer and feminist performance projects. Discussing the work of Rosana Cade, Mullan claims that lesbians can often get overshadowed within queer performance culture, which is dominated by gay male experience. As a strategic corrective, she explores the value of separating the terms lesbian and queer, considering the possibilities afforded by what she frames as post-lesbianism and post-lesbian theatre practice.
The final contribution explores how the interaction between queer performance and social media technologies might create new audiences and zones of impact, and require alternative methodologies of analysis. Fintan Walsh highlights how queer performance might continue to intervene in homophobia, drawing upon a short speech given by drag queen Panti in the Abbey Theatre, Ireland, in February 2014. Walsh discusses how the live space of theatre allowed this speech to circumvent media censorship, while its recording and viral dissemination across social media made it a point of global discussion.
We hope that this forum illuminates the ongoing, vital interactions among queer theatre, performance and theory, and the continued importance of queer research within our disciplines, including the work of IFTR.
