Editorial Comment: Queer Research in Performance

As a corporeal practice centering on bodies upon which ideologies of gender and sexuality converge and from which they emanate, performance—located, relational, textualized, vocalized, costumed, choreographed—has been an acute site for queer subversions, critiques, and ways of knowing and for the activation of queer significations, experiences, feelings, desires, and communities. This special issue articulates some of the intersections of queerness and performance through historical and contemporary examples that deploy innovative historiographic and critical strategies and theoretical perspectives to elucidate queer research in performance as both subject and method.

The issue begins with Kim Marra’s remarkable essay “Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance Historiography,” which exemplifies the various resonances of the issue’s title: research on queer performance, past and present; the researcher’s own performance of queer analysis; performance as a queer methodology for conducting research. In her wittily titled review essay of recent queer scholarship, “LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing,” published in this same issue, Sue-Ellen Case describes queer studies as an “interested” field. Marra exemplifies such “interestedness” in “Riding, Scarring, Knowing,” recounting how her recent foray into solo autobiographical performance enabled her to understand how her own past experiences with horses and riding, both pleasurable and traumatic, might inform her scholarly research into nineteenth-century women’s equestrian performance. Drawing upon a personal archive that is not only material but also emotional and corporeal, Marra’s essay is at once a consideration of how embodied performance can function as a queer methodology for historical research, a moving account of how lesbian identity intersects with queer historiography, and an analysis of the transgressive gender and sexual dimensions and cross-species relations of women’s equestrian performance.

The horsewomen of Marra’s nineteenth-century research were precursors of the “new women” who would become central figures in modern drama and whose real-life counterparts would become generative of both first-wave feminism and modernism. In the modernist context, new sexual-identity categories were emerging into public consciousness alongside new gender roles, although often pathologized or imbued with shame. The protagonist of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913–14 though not published until 1971, the year after the author’s death, admits his homosexuality to his doctor by saying, “I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”¹ The medical and juridical context suggested through Maurice’s admission similarly informed the narrative for Mae West’s 1927 play The Drag, which features a male “invert” whose father is a judge and whose father-in-law is a psychiatrist. In her highly engaging essay on The Drag and West’s other “gay play,” The Pleasure Man (1928), Ariel Nereson looks beyond the scripted narratives that have been the focus of most studies of the plays and instead centers on the female impersonators who appeared in the show-stopping “drag balls” that interrupted West’s melodramatic plotting and were, in fact, the highlights—and flashpoints—of both plays. Rather than dismissing West’s plays as simply prurient and sensationalist works seeking to exploit a taste for “slumming” among straight audiences, Nereson supplements West’s scant stage directions and snippets of dialogue for the drag ball scenes with evidence of performance and reception drawn from what she calls “the lively archive” of previews, reviews, and newspaper accounts of the police raids on the shows and the trial of The Pleasure Man. In doing so, she discovers evidence that the drag balls within both plays functioned as queer performances for queer spectators and that despite their visibility—and in the legitimate cultural domain of Broadway, no less—these queer performances in certain respects deliberately resisted legibility by straight spectators and instead functioned to foster queer community and gay kinship both within the worlds of the plays and between queer performers and spectators. A grainy newspaper image of two female impersonators from The Pleasure Man “embracing the spotlight as they make their way to the paddy wagon” (as captioned in Nereson’s essay) provides a celebratory counter to the more familiar representations of queer subjects within the modernist literary canon.

David Savran’s essay also centers...