Absent, Invisible, and Incoherent: Archiving Queer Women’s Performance Futurities

Without a mandated space for her theatrical performance, the queer woman artist is othered and nomadic in her practice. The shifting borders that map her spaces offer both benefits and obstacles: she is free of the confines of a static venue but in a constant search for her next performance space. While there are significant achievements in queer women’s performance that are worthy of celebration, the transience of queer women’s spaces affects not only these works’ development and production in the present but also their prominence within the historical archive and the potentialities afforded to their works in the future, impacting both queer visibility in history and queer futurities.

The need to struggle repeatedly to secure venues for rehearsals and productions leaves queer women artists unable to focus needed attention on how their work is documented. Thus, a lack of stable space also contributes to perpetuating cycles of invisibility. This article does not seek to essentialize experiences of space as any one thing but, in contrast, seeks to examine how the transience of queer women’s performance presents ongoing challenges in the documentation and historicization of queer women’s performance, practice, and community.