Queer Dramaturgies

International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer

Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier, Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137411846
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This international collection of essays forms a vibrant picture of the scope and diversity of contemporary queer performance. Ranging across cabaret, performance art, the performativity of film, drag and script-based theatre it unravels the dynamic relationship performance has with queerness as it is presented in local and transnational contexts.

Part I

Queer Notions of Nation

Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier

Introduction

The chapters in this section present a set of fine-grained narratives about queer performance and its relation to the geographical places in which it happens. By way of nuanced analyses of performances and their relation to local manifestations of queerness, the chapters critically recirculate terms and discussions focused on the relation of queernesses with notions of nation, with discourses of the transnational, diasporic and global and with ideas of nationhood and identity. With geographical specificity in mind, these essays resist a flattening out of the diversity of queer practice that can happen within discourses of the ‘global gay’ (Altman 1996, 1997; and various reworkings and critiques, for instance, see Binnie 2004a, 2004b; Brown 2012; Halberstam 2005; Jackson 2004; Oswin 2006). The chapters in this section identify and mark the relationship of these discourses with neoliberalism and (neo)colonialism, and present visions of queerness and gayness that challenge the standard western rights-based narratives of how those who claim a queer position might live in a society. In laying out a range of possibilities of queernesses as they appear in arts practices, the section offers reflections on the negotiation with national legislative and social frameworks that take place when queer work appears, notably in conservative places. The essays consider the notion of nation as fluid and constructed, which draws a focus to the material impacts of these constructs, and how they manifest in performances and performance practices.

Consequently, chapters in this section (Adebayo, Çakırlar, Khouri, Wansin Wong) engage with queernesses in places in the world where the social and/or legislative context is difficult and potentially dangerous. They draw attention to the ways in which queer performance is made in contexts where people who claim non-normative sexualities carve out a life somewhat precariously. We must also note that some people who identify as queer can be less mobile in these situations than the notion of transnationalism might imply and, with a nod to the dangers of seeing the local as the ‘authentic’, we are mindful of the relationship between state legislation and the choices available for queers to live or queernesses to be present. Enacting a non-binary gender identity in some countries is far less dangerous than others; in some, simply publicly discussing or presenting homosexuality in a positive light is dangerous. Thus there are local considerations in play when we consider the relative radicalism or resistance played out in queer performance. As the chapters here look to queernesses in the light of the construct of nation, they do so not only with an eye on what is pertinent to that situation, but also what is in common, or not, with other queernesses in other places on the globe (Adebayo, Khouri, Greer).

The authors here look to the manner in which queer people might interact with state apparatuses that work to generate a solid sense of state or nation, and position queernesses in particular ways in relation to them. This, often state-produced, position can hold the potential for positivity or require queers to be negatively present in relation to the state – and sometimes not present at all.

In his chapter on theatre in contemporary Poland, Bryce Lease notes that the way in which rights agendas have developed in Europe, for instance, has been patchy. Lease’s chapter reads the performance work of Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski in the light of the country entering into the European Union (EU), and shows the dynamics of performance work in a culture that came to EU rights-based agendas all at one time as a fait accompli, rather than through an incremental history of wins in a battle. Even though, in Poland, homosexual activities have never been illegal (formally codified in 1932), this is not to deny the powerful historic homophobia in the country, as Lease elucidates.

The essays engage with how queerness as an idea can be seen as a colonising imposition from elsewhere, not commensurate with a vision of identity rooted in a nation. For instance, as Lazlo Pearlman’s essay asserts, in France, queerness is in some ways resisted as an ‘American idea’. This is interesting given that France is/was the home of a number of ideas, theorists and philosophers whose works form a vital part of the genesis of queer theory (perhaps Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘discursive formations’, in particular).¹ In his chapter, Pearlman focuses on the way that ‘Frenchness’, as he sees it, is evident in specific forms of theatre whose success, as he notes, has been largely limited to France. Thus he uses the Grand Guignol, a 19th-century theatre form specialising in horror, to articulate a vision of Frenchness that is undone in the show Le Vrai Spectacle, presented by the performance troupe Kisses Cause Trouble. Such a form serves in his essay to show how queer work in a nation that resists queerness as an idea (seeing it as an imposition from elsewhere) presents a differently hued queerness – ‘Frenching the queer’, as he puts it. Of course, this is not only a French articulation of queer but also, simultaneously, a resistance to normative visions of Frenchness. Pearlman’s essay looks to the relation of the state to the queer and vice versa, showing how work that might be seen ‘simply’ as queer makes interventions into both French performance culture and the relationship between national aesthetics and the idea/ideology of a French ‘nation’.

Without wishing to discount the homophobia present in French public life, most notably seen at the time of writing (2013–2015) in terms of conflicts over same-sex marriage, the resistance to queerness that Pearlman mainly deals with is a resistance to the idea of queer as a critical, theoretical position. In contrast, Melissa Wansin Wong’s essay deals with queer work in Singapore, where she notes that there are several penal codes in place prohibiting some sex acts (between men but not between women or heterosexuals). Her work reads the ways in which queer performance is present in a location where, on the one hand, there are prohibitions on queer activity and, on the other, a neolib-erally enabled queer position exists as a matter of state pragmatism. Through a reading of the Pink Dot phenomenon – a public gathering of gay and queer people, and their supporters and families – and Loo Zihan’s performance piece entitled Cane (a reworking/re-enactment of a 1994 work by Joseph Ng about the entrapment of 12 gay men), Wansin Wong examines the negotiations and vacillations with the state in order for queer work/queernesses to be presented/present. She outlines in her essay the close relationship between neoliberalism and the opening up of work that in the past ended in the arrest of performance artists. She notes particularly the way these works can be present is through ‘hybrid performances that merge global LGBTQ rights discourses with Asian-based rhetoric’ (Chapter 3: 66). Thus queer work reacts fluidly to a national situation that merges conservative national (‘Asian’) values with a neoliberal agenda focused on the individual (and, as such, responding to western LGBTQ rights agendas). This dichotomy is identified by Audrey Yue as ‘illiberal pragmatics’ (2007) and Wong draws usefully on Yue’s term to offer an analysis of how her case studies sit in relationship to this ideological position. Such a pragmatic mode is a response to a specific national situation and Wong notes, following Yue, it is an account that presents a different perspective than the dominant US narrative that takes its foundation from riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969. As such, her chapter pluralises ‘a’ queer creation myth rooted in a particular culture and historical time. At the same time, however, her work emphasises the relation of the acceptance of queernesses to the power of globalisation in the form of neoliberalism (rather in the same way that Lisa Duggan (2003) powerfully elucidates the point that gay rights have become inculcated in the neoliberal agenda).

This position is emphasised by Cüneyt Çakırlar in his essay on masculinity, militarism, sexuality and the state in the work of Turkish artist Erinç Seymen. Noting a local resistance to a logic that dictates how non-western cultures are ‘gayed’, he argues that the western neoliberal agenda can be seen ‘as a form of neo-colonialism where globalised political discourses of gender and sexual liberation become “the new yardsticks for democracy” and a new ideological means of racism and Islamophobia’ (Chapter 4: 84). Thus what appears as a liberal impulse in the US/UK context becomes a tool in positioning other cultures negatively. Çakırlar notes that such a binary relation of the ‘West and the rest’ coagulates a range of diversities and leaves little room for reflection on individual states’ histories and the impact of colonial relations on the present. Through these ideas, Çakırlar’s work in this volume adds another narrative in the polysemy of queer work as it relates to dominant (queer) narrative histories and critical tendencies. These tendencies can in themselves do neocolonial work because they may impose certain western historical discourses on the discussion of queernesses and paint those queernesses in ways that appeal to an inclusion in neoliberal state legislation.

Amahl Khouri’s addition to this section continues the discussion focused on ideas of the state and extends it to the social realities of queer precarity. In her work for this volume – an extract of the play No Matter Where I Go, presented as part of a conference at the American University of Beirut – Khouri discusses the relationship of queer bodies and identities both with the city and the intellectual positions of queer theory. Khouri presents a vision of the lived realities of dealing with queerness in Lebanon and the play text shows a group of queer-identified people getting ready to produce a performance-paper for a conference. They discuss and illustrate how queer-identified people survive in Beirut whilst simultaneously engaging with the politics of queer representation in relation to the West. Rather than playing (or translating) a vision for queer eyes that only wishes to see queer women and non-binary-gendered persons represented in ways focused on victimhood, the play is about the negotiation of representation on terms set by the queer-identified people making it, whilst also openly talking about survival strategies of queer identity in negotiation with the social and the state. Because it is clear how risky it is to voice these perspectives in a public space in Lebanon (let alone to publish them in a book), it is a powerful claim to position oneself in terms of discourses of surviving and thriving, rather than victimhood, for people who do not have the same rights as the apparently liberal West.

Similarly, Stephen Greer’s chapter deals with how relations of gender and nationalism play out in the figure of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Manning, as a trans*-identified person, became the focus of individual, local responses to governmental transparency through the I am Bradley Manning online campaign, which garnered international participation. Alongside reading this internet site as cultural intervention, Greer looks to Tim Price’s National Theatre Wales’ play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning (2012). The play connects Manning to historical events in Wales, UK, where Manning spent some time as a teenager. The figure of Manning in the performance is situated across temporal zones, so that a (fictional) line is drawn linking local Welsh historical stories with Manning, whose activities in the US led to her incarceration. Thus a queer temporality occurs in the work. What emerges in Greer’s contribution is the point that non-local figures might be mobilised to tell narratives that are locally important. In so doing, on the one hand, there is a connection with a local history that might render a non-local one more discernible whilst, on the other hand, the non-local may also elucidate something about the local: in some way the use of a figure from the US with connections to Wales renders a local historical account more resonant for an audience. The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning serves in our wider discussion as a dynamic that demonstrates how the international, transnational and trans-temporal perspective of a queer figure functions as an instrument for rendering in contemporary terms an historical story. Thus, through Greer’s reading of The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning and the I am Bradley Manning campaign, a queer pluralism can be expressed that engages with transnationalism, trans* and the transit of identity as the site of collective action in response to the state.

The interp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies
• Part I: Queer Notions of Nation
• Part II: Queer Returns: Locating Queer Temporalities
• Part III: Queer Movements: Home and Away
• Afterword
• Index