Queer Performance and Performativities

This section of QED is dedicated to the documentation and illumination of events/performances/happenings in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTTQ) communities. In particular, the construction of “queer performance and performativities” reference that set of activities in/of/as related to LGBTTQ communities; a diverse range of activities relevant to intersecting academia and activism in a LGBTTQ worldmaking project. Such events/performances might include, but are not limited to, solo and performance art across a range of genres, reviews of films or film festivals, concerts, exhibitions, theater, television events; documentation of protests, marches, queer occupy actions, critiques of headlining events, and conferences. Queer performance is constructed in the broadest sense of embodied/engaged activity with the intent to celebrate or illuminate the practices, politics, and polemics of LGBTTQ lives; performativities are critical interventions in the repetitive regimes of the normal that inspire the impulse of queer activism and the politics of being LGBTTQ.

In this inaugural issue, the three section editors offer three important meditations on queer performance and performativities. In his performance review, Madison Moore introduces us to the queer punk performances of SSION, a Kansas City-bred art and music collective led by mad scientist Cody Critcheloe. SSION, whose sonic landscape is a little bit retro and a little bit camp, creates a unique queer subcultural universe, one that critiques the possibilities of queerness from within the purview of queerness. We are led through a discussion of a 2010 SSION performance at a New York gallery called The Hole before we go to a SSION performance in Washington, D.C. Along the way we learn of the potential for queer music to be alternative queer worldmaking.

In “A Pride Poem for Queer Graduation Ceremonies,” Bryant Keith Alexander offers ostensibly a poetic keynote address, an amalgam of a series of keynotes and welcomes that Alexander presented at lavender/gay/queer/rainbow graduation ceremonies. The broader illumination is on such cultural graduation ceremonies that “acknowledge the lives and achievements of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender [transgender and queer] college students.”¹

C. Riley Snorton provides a travelogue of sorts. Perhaps a more accurate description would be to cast his contribution as a series of meditations, furtive notes, and idiosyncratic musings on conferences he attended this year. Conferences reflect the contours of fields at a given time, producing new lines of inquiry that emerge from bringing divergent political and intellectual genealogies into a temporally and geographically bound instance of relationality. It is our hope that conference reviews will be a regular feature in QED. For so many of us, it is our relationship to queer academic spaces beyond our institutional locales that informs our understanding of how queer studies make (and unmake) worlds.

The three editors working collaboratively will consider submissions for inclusion in the “Queer Performance and Performativities” section of QED. Please feel free to make submissions to any of the three editors: Bryant Keith Alexander (bryantkeithalexander@lmu.edu), Madison Alexander Moore (mynameismadisonmoore@gmail.com), or C. Riley Snorton (crsnorton@northwestern.edu).