Introduction: Performative Rhetorics of Desire, Resistance, and Possibility

My partner and I recently travelled to New York City. While there we saw the Tony Award-winning musical Kinky Boots. The Broadway musical is based on a 2005 film with the same name, lyrics by Cyndi Lauper and book/script by Harvey Fierstein. It tells what is said to be a true story of a British shoe company that made “traditional” shoes, struggling to stay afoot, and its unlikely survival through the production of kinky boots— elaborate thigh-high footwear for drag queens. And although there is a dichotomy between “traditional” and the “nontraditional” products and the audiences they serve, there is a more important dichotomy at play in this play: between two characters—Charlie, the white heir apparent to the shoe company, who struggles with his commitment to the shoe business and a life elsewhere with his fiancé, and a black boy, Simon, who discovers his sexuality through a pair of red pumps who is destined to become the premier drag queen, Lola, in the musical.

Each boy/man engages in struggles with their identities as sons to fathers with definite opinions on who/what/how their boys should be. The relational dynamic between the sons—filled with consternation, collaboration, and coexistence—serves as the cornerstone of the play, and to each their survival. And while my partner and I sit in the theatre, a black man and a white man watching this narrative of difference and sameness playing out on the stage (and reflecting on our own struggles with fathers), I am also intrigued by the snow on the roof tops of the mostly white, tipping over middle-aged audience, at this Saturday matinee performance of Kinky Boots on Broadway; an “audience as the jury” as Tim Miller later writes—to which the ethic of this show truly performs and that it seeks to transform. During the intermission, while standing at the urinal in the men’s room, a seemingly straight white man standing next to me in the half-stall mistakenly reads me as straight black man (all black men are presumed to be straight, and in this case, certainly straighter than the black queens on the stage)—and directs a joke to me (as we urinate) about how funny the faggots are on the stage. And I am conflicted. I am conflicted with the dichotomy in performance as consciousness raising and performance as entertainment of the musical Kinky Boots. This as I stood in that current theatre of entrapment, the bathroom, with this upstanding audience member, as he talks about the faggots in the play on stage—not knowing that he is talking, dick in hand, to a faggot. How queer is that? And although the musical, with high camp, endearing characters and heart-touching revelations through songs that speak across the gender politics of the subplot or the class politics of employer and employees and drag queen, is in many ways engaging, this is not really a review of Kinky Boots. Instead, in watching Kinky Boots, and maybe even in that moment of queer urinal talk, I am reminded of the themes that play out in the two performance scripts featured in this issue’s section of Queer Performance and Performativities.

Each performance script enacts rhetorics of desire, resistance, and possibility in and through crafted language and the dynamism that gives new life to past experience in performance. Each performance script, like the musical Kinky Boots, is a narration of the actual happenings crafted by the potency of performance that animates the retelling of experience. Each performance script serves as a soundtrack of queer lives, chronicling presences and absences in lyrics and social doctrines that not only narrate experiences but also dictate lives. And yet each of these performances make clear its determination of performance as protest, performance as social change, performance as transformational, performance as an interventionist strategy in the politics of GLBTQ worldmaking that cannot be reduced to “how funny the faggots are on stage”; in which the stage is not a fixed space for a performance of entertainment, but a stage that bleeds the borders of the...