Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure sets itself the task of ‘dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (2011: 2). To do so it constructs what Halberstam calls a ‘silly archive’, which ranges from the animated cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović’s performance art to Elfride Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Failure, for Halberstam, is not to be avoided, as it offers insights, ways of being, forms of politics and paradigms of resistance to current hegemonies. Working within the realm of queer theory and cultural studies, the book strangely echoes the 1970s sentiments of punk refusal as well as the global gay liberationists’ call for the invention of revolutionary sexualities outside of familial relations. Its dismantling of failure aims to show how winning is currently predicated upon losers. The inequitable neo-liberal ideologies that constitute today’s winners and losers relies on a basic assumption: those who lose did not work hard enough and thus deserve their fate. Halberstam asks us to consider the justice in winning in a global economy whose winners – the 1 per cent – do take all, leave very little for the rest of us, and next to nothing for those at the bottom end of the economic hierarchy. With ‘low theory’, an approach adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Halberstam brings together an eccentric array of sources. Low theory, for Halberstam, aims broadly and looks to arrive at counter-hegemonic options that are widely accessible. He defines low theory as less beholden to a particular telos and, again citing Hall, sees it ‘not as an end onto itself but “a detour en route to something else”’ (Halberstam 2011: 15). In a book about failure, it follows that Halberstam envisions low theory as a means to eschew goal-oriented politics and social theories. It is ‘open’ to ‘unpredictable outcomes’ and is ‘adaptable, shifting, and flexible’ (2011: 16). Halberstam predicates his low theory on what Hall describes as Gramsci’s ‘open’ Marxism. According to Hall, Gramsci’s theories were derived from the application of Marxist ideas to the real political problems that he faced in life, not from a deterministic application of theory in service of a teleological political project. Halberstam inserts himself into this logic by envisioning an ‘open pedagogy’ that is similarly amenable to questioning, that is bottom-up in its perspective and that ‘detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes’; instead, it ‘orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice’ (2011: 16–17). A large part of Halberstam’s silly archive is animated and stopmotion movies of the past decade, designed, made and marketed for mass audiences, mainly comprising children. Halberstam calls these movies ‘Pixarvolt’, finding in the works of Pixar and DreamWorks recipes for collective rebellion against capitalist economies and power and, in short, a ‘revolt’ against the status quos of neo-liberal humanism. These films, Halberstam argues, are made for children, who he sees as kinds of failed subjects, people for whom the world is not designed, who are clumsy and frustrated with various forms of authority, who are ready and willing to view the world in new ways, and for whom a revolution is a promising option. In these films, Halberstam sees ‘a rich technological field for rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality, and posthumanity’ (2011: 174). He notes that Pixarvolt’s plots usually revolve around a struggle between human and non-human creatures in relationships that ‘resemble what used to be called “class struggle,” and they offer numerous scenarios of revolt and alternatives to grim, mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption’ (Halberstam 2011: 29). Pixarvolt films also focus on escapes from captivity that culminate in utopian dreams of freedom, elements in which he finds neither childishness nor a trajectory towards adult freedom but the dreams and means of social transformation. Key to Halberstam’s analysis is the counter-intuitive connections he argues the films create between communitarian revolt and queer forms of embodiment. Pixarvolt films, Halberstam argues, can provide new modes of thinking and new models of family, parenting and sociality. ‘While many Marxist scholars have characterized and dismissed queer politics as “body politics,”’ Halberstam argues, ‘these films recognize that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination’ (2011: 29). Halberstam concedes that there are no guarantees that animated

The Queer Art of Failure

The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

This thesis argues that participatory performance projects can materialise better worlds for marginalised subjects. Drawing on and contributing to performance studies, queer studies and fun studies, it proposes a concept of reproductive queer futurity. This concept expands José Esteban Muñoz’s work on queer futurity (a utopian position rooted in collective hope for better worlds for marginalised subjects) by foregrounding the intentional reproduction of technologies of hope. The thesis argues that reproductive queer futurity is well served by forms and processes that emerge from lived experience and operate autonomously and adaptively to generate hope in routine ways. The operation of these homemade mutant hope machines (as the thesis calls them) is powerfully supported by queer understandings of family (framed here in relation to material support and intergenerational transmission) and fun (framed here in relation to the perception of low stakes and the capacity for civic intervention). Participatory performance projects can make good homemade mutant hope machines. Chapter One articulates the concept of reproductive queer futurity. Chapters Two and Three respectively conceptualise revised understandings of queer family and fun. Subsequent chapters illustrate these concepts through case studies of participatory projects by the London-based queer performance collective Duckie (1995-), analysed primarily through participant observation, interviews and surveys. Chapter Four analyses the Duckie Homosexualist Summer School (2015-2016), a training programme for young LGBTQI+ performers. Chapter Five analyses the ‘vintage clubbing’ cycle of immersive nightlife events (2010-2016) reanimating past instances of queer socialising. Chapter Six analyses the Posh Club (2012-), an afternoon cabaret for older people at risk of isolation. These analyses show how low-stakes situations, material support, intergenerational transmission and reproducible forms and understandings enable self-expression, relationality and agency in contexts of marginalisation. Collectively, they show how structures of queer fun and family mobilised through participatory performance can generate hope and materialise better worlds.

Queer fun, family and futures in Duckie's performance projects, 2010-2016

The hostile environment that older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people faced at younger ages in the United Kingdom (UK) may have a lasting negative impact on their health. This systematic scoping review adds to the current knowledge base through comprehensively synthesising evidence on what is known about the extent and nature of health and care inequalities, as well as highlighting gaps in the evidence which point the way towards future research priorities. We searched four databases, undertook manual searching, and included studies which presented empirical findings on LGBT people aged 50+ in the UK and their physical and mental health or social care status. From a total of 5,738 records, 48 papers from 42 studies were eligible and included for data extraction. The synthesis finds that inequities exist across physical and mental health, as well as in social care, exposure to violence and loneliness. Social care environments appeared as a focal point for inequities and formal care environments severely compromised the identity and relationships that older LGBT people developed over their lifecourse. Conversely, the literature demonstrated how some older LGBT people successfully negotiated age-related transitions, e.g. emphasising the important role of LGBT-focused social groups in offsetting social isolation and loneliness. While there exist clear policy implications around the requirement for formal care environments to change to accommodate an increasingly diverse older population, there is also a need to explore how to support older LGBT people to maintain their independence for longer, reducing the need for formal care.

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Inequalities in older LGBT people's health and care needs in the United Kingdom: a systematic scoping review.

This article examines the tendencies of LGBT intergenerational theater projects. By engaging with ideas of queer time, temporal drag, and the pervasive heteronormative imagery of heritability and inheritance, this article explores the possibility that LGBT intergenerational projects may generate some of the problems they aim to challenge. Through the lens of queer time, the article describes the normativity generated in LGBT intergenerational theater projects as a form of restrictive interpellation. The article explores the temporal complexities at play in such theater productions as The Front Room, a specific LGBT intergenerational theater project performed in the United Kingdom in 2011. The article concludes by noting some ways in which intergenerational theater projects might seek to work through the embodiment of the historical quotidian as a mode of resistance to normativity’s recirculation.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00918369.2015.1061361

Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities.

This short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher–practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls ‘hard knowledge’ above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of research methods inherently bound up with the researcher as an individual and the materiality of lived experience within research. Yet, in our experience, although each PaR project is individual, PaR projects follow certain shared modes evolving largely from embodied and heuristic research methods adapted from social sciences, such as (auto)ethnography, participant observation, phenomenology and action research. PaR methodology in theatre and performance is composed of a bricolage of these openly embodied methods, which makes PaR, as an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries, somewhat queer in academic terms already. It is unsurprising, then, that PaR is so attractive to queer practitioner–researchers bent on queering normative hierarchies of knowledge.

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Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business

Recently there has been an internationalisation in the training of UK drag performers. Whilst papers exist focused on drag kings and queens related to their community, few explore how kings/queens ...

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International influences and drag: just a case of tucking or binding?

This paper investigates the resonances of Orton’s work for contemporary queer audiences. By presenting potential reasons for the rise and fall in popularity and visibility of Orton’s work for queer and gay audiences through the 1980s and 1990s, this paper looks to the queer context in which Joe Orton’s work developed in order to explore the queer social history into which it fits. This sense of queer history is linked to contemporary notions of queer theorising about temporalities and queer dramaturgy, which offers potentially novel ways of engaging with Orton’s work queerly without twisting it to fit a ‘neat’ reading, in part because such readings tend to ‘smooth out’ the more difficult elements of the work. In particular, the paper explores the theatrical form of farce, often articulated as conservative, in relation to queer positions, which are quite the opposite. In so doing, the paper, by way of queer temporalities and work on queer dramaturgies, sketches out a reading strategy that does not ...

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Sticky Stories: Joe Orton, Queer History, Queer Dramaturgy

Theatre and live performance experiences can, if they are powerful, move an audience — to emotion, to thought, even (on rare occasions) to action. Like many theatre experiences, the moments described above ‘moved’ us when we saw them. We were aware that they resonated in a particularly profound way for us, in a way that was different from what we had otherwise experienced in our personal theatre-going histories. We recognised that these moments were transgressive, and that something was happening that felt out of place with our expectations. We were each moved to question what exactly had caused such a profound affective connection with the work. This ‘something’, we realised, was queer. For both of us, the search for an answer led us (eventually) to queer theory. But before we got to theory, we started with performance — as makers and spectators and, eventually, as academic researchers and teachers. In particular we recognised that our encounters with the spaces of theatres, gay/lesbian bars and queer cabarets, the performances we saw in them and the people we saw them with, were about us experiencing something on a corporeal, gut level in a specific location at a particular time and being attracted to it. We knew something had happened to us, and the people around us, and we understood that it was connected to sexuality, community and identity.

Stephen Farrier

Papers

Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities.

Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business

International influences and drag: just a case of tucking or binding?

Sticky Stories: Joe Orton, Queer History, Queer Dramaturgy

Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies