Introduction: A Farewell to the Section

In the inaugural issue of QED, the “Queer Performance and Performativities” section was launched with a mission dedicated to a documentation and illumination of events/performances/happenings in/of/as related to GLBTQ communities. The section has appeared in three issues of QED with this issue being the final appearance. QED stands firm in the celebration and illumination of “embodied/engaged performance activity” that has been a part of the intent of the Queer Performance and Performativities section. To this extent, QED will continue to accept essays and submissions with this focus but for the inclusion in the broader journal. And as some scholars have written on the fleeting and ephemeral nature of performance, and still others argue for the lingering effects of performance and performative engagement—the short life of this section will have an impact that resonates throughout future issues of the journal—as a continued call and signal for essays, performance scripts, descriptions and think pieces that celebrate or illuminate the practices, politics and polemics of GLBTQ lives; and queer performativities as critical interventions in the repetitive regimes of the normal that inspire the impulse of queer activism and the politics of being.

With that note, allow me to further frame the final section. It is my pleasure to offer these three submissions because they represent diversity amongst diversities in the notion of queer performance and performativities. In the first piece “A Queer Dialogue on The Gay Rub,” Anthony J. Garrison-Engbrecht offers an interview with Steven Reigns—poet, educator, artist, and activist— on his latest work, The Gay Rub. The Gay Rub is an art exhibition that seeks to document and display markers devoted to GLBT people and places around the world and in doing so, tell a broader version about queer history and queer worldmaking. In Reigns’s own construction,

Rub as a verb can mean to upset someone “Rub someone the wrong way.” It can also mean truth “That’s the rub” or social friction “He got a lot of rub for that.” It’s also slang for sexual activity. Most importantly, it is an abbreviation for the word rubbing. All meanings apply in this situation. GLBT people have caused social friction and others find our lifestyle upsetting. The Gay Rub collection [is] an assembling of our gay truth and the rubbings that comes from it.¹

Garrison-Engbrecht, director of the Office of LGBT Student Services at Loyola Marymount University, frames his interview with Reigns by contextualizing the exhibition within a progressive tradition of support for LGBTQ students at Loyola Marymount, a Catholic university in the Jesuit and Marymount traditions.

In his photographic essay, “Performing The Homo-Nazi Effect: Gay Neo-Nazism, Digital Drag Attack, and the Postcinematic Cultures of Crisis,” Alexandros Papadopoulos chronicles and critiques both an aspect of the life of Nicky Crane, an iconic figure of a London-based neo-Nazi movement, who came out as gay in a TV documentary, but who was also outed as an amateur gay porn film star. The essay explores the vices, vicissitudes, and verisimilitude of art/reality, sex, and violence. Drawing on the episodic testimony of an Athens-based neo-Nazi, it shows how homo-Nazi theatres of transgression—that is, the exhibitionist rituals of power, violence, and humiliation—do not “displace” or “oppress” a hidden world of sexual instincts: they rather expose, stage and play out a world of queer self-expression. “Brutality” does not “disguise” sex—it is sex in itself.

And finally, I think it is appropriate to close the queer performance and performativities section with the article, “Two ‘Gaysian’ Junior Faculty Performances as Embodied Texts: A Collaborative Autoethnography,” by Shinsuke Eguchi and Andrew Spieldenner. Appropriate because the article brings us back to performance in everyday life, the embodied experience of being queer, the political perceptions of queerness in heteronormative spheres, and the repetitive acts that naturalize human social engagements to which the notion of performativity and performativities signal. In many ways the article, a form of collaborative autoethnography, has two self-identified “gaysian” (gay and Asian) professors narrating and critically analyzing experiences at the intersectional politics of...