What’s Queer about Queer Performance Now?

When we ask ‘what’s queer about queer performance now’, the question is a nod to the past (and the influential issue of Social Text called ‘What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now’ from 2005) but it is also perpetually in the present: what now? The edition of Social Text explored how queer studies might function in a specific political climate, at that time in response to shifts in identity politics and new approaches to queer epistemologies. We set ourselves and our contributors a similar challenge, but this time with a focus on theatre and performance: what is queer performance now, how do we recognise it, how do we make it, how do we talk and write about it and what might queer performance do? On the one hand we could answer the question of what queer performance is now: ‘the same as ever’. By this we might mean, at its most basic, resistance to the normative, in terms of gender and sexuality and dramaturgy. As part of this resistance, we see how queer performance’s best current manifestations can challenge and question histories (including queer histories), drawing attention to their fluidity and lack of stability, rather than solidifying them and sequestering queer narratives in the past. We might even claim that (in some parts of the world) queer performance’s interventions in gender, sexuality, and dramaturgy have had an impact on popular culture in a way that has queered cultural representation to a certain noticeable extent (we might look here, for example, at the advances around casting and representation across film and television and even awards’ criteria, for instance the well-publicised gender transition of Elliot Page and the television series Pose). However, we would not want to characterise all queer performance as done, perfectly formed, open, and resistive. We note that that queer performance does not appear across the globe in a consistent and coherent fashion, which maintains our position that queer writers, scholars, and performance makers can also fail queer’s resistive drive. This potential for failure can be observed through some queer performances’ hegemonic claims for normalisation and inadvertent or deliberate inequalities in access and representation. There are also some specifics of our recent and 1. David L. Eng, J. Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?’, Social Text 84–85, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (2005): 1-17.