Performing the Pandemics

Stemming from one creative experience that emerged in London during the lockdown period of early 2020, called the “Emergency Festival”, this article is a result of observations based on practice, centred around the festival that a group of multicultural, interdisciplinary movement-based researchers and dancers created, curated, and participated in. It explores the possibility of making a radical alterity out of a hitherto previously established ideas of territory, time, and community, using performative writing as practice-based analysis scheme. Employing the concept of “communitas” by Victor Turner (1969) to approach the phenomenon of dance through distance, the article examines the importance of the emergence of collaboration as a way forward, epistemologically looking at dance as a method of creating and sustaining communities that are longing for a sense of home in times of change. The writing is divided into three parts, focussing on the aspects of space, time, and community, all the while embedded in the nature of movement and its effect on the practitioners, and onlookers, concluding with contemplation on the place of dance in varied mediums and the way forward to study it in a period of global disruption.

(The) Margin(s) Speak! A Multifaceted Examination of Practising ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ Development in Bangkok

<p>In this study, I explore the experiences and understandings of twenty-seven participants involved with ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) development interventions in Bangkok, seeking to better understand the complex realities that emerge in practising MSM development. I endeavor to interrogate the development field’s limited understandings of sexuality as well as the discourses present (and absent) in existing Queering Development research. By acknowledging my personal journey in and through this re-search, I also examine authentic ways-of-being a queeresearcher, noting the challenges I faced and power I discovered in re-searching and re-presenting my own work. Ultimately, I explore the link between the paucity of local developing queer narratives in Queering Development and the limited space students have, to be visibly queer in mainstream theses – to do this I use the metaphor of ‘the margins’. In framing this re-search, I draw nourishment from queer, critical, poststructural and Participatory Action Research epistemologies. Methodologically, I carried out semi-structured interviews and focus groups, as well as using other tools such as mapping and story writing. I also spent time ‘hanging out’ at both Rainbow Sky and Bangkok Rainbow, enabling both a deeper appreciation of the work carried out by the organisations as well as providing an opportunity to gather materials. The generation of data did not cease once I left ‘the field’; I continued to produce autoethnographic texts including poetry and a re-search performance which I used both as a method of enquiry and re-presentation of this study. This multifaceted approach enabled diverse questions (emerging across disciplines) to be addressed in my work. To re-present my analyses of participants’ accounts I have celebrated different ways-of-knowing re-search. I have used poetry and consciously performative writing, visual art (including graffiti) and performance alongside traditional scholarly prose. This approach enables multiple voices to emerge all over the page, questioning the hegemony of the bound, straight-lined thesis and the ‘legitimate’ knowledges it generally contains. I argue that queer postgraduate students may be able to open spaces to produce authentic work, despite pressures to perform straight research texts. Yet, pressures to conform to traditional understandings of theses may be painful reminders of their own positions in academia and society. Overall, my study offers intimate, multifaceted perspectives on the agency of MSM development practitioners in Bangkok and my own experience of finding power through queeresearch. I hope it will contribute to more nuanced understandings of local practitioners of MSM development in Queering Development literature, and to scholarship on queer postgraduate students’ experience of re-search more generally.</p>

(The) Margin(s) Speak! A Multifaceted Examination of Practising ‘Men who have Sex with Men’ Development in Bangkok

<p>In this study, I explore the experiences and understandings of twenty-seven participants involved with ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) development interventions in Bangkok, seeking to better understand the complex realities that emerge in practising MSM development. I endeavor to interrogate the development field’s limited understandings of sexuality as well as the discourses present (and absent) in existing Queering Development research. By acknowledging my personal journey in and through this re-search, I also examine authentic ways-of-being a queeresearcher, noting the challenges I faced and power I discovered in re-searching and re-presenting my own work. Ultimately, I explore the link between the paucity of local developing queer narratives in Queering Development and the limited space students have, to be visibly queer in mainstream theses – to do this I use the metaphor of ‘the margins’. In framing this re-search, I draw nourishment from queer, critical, poststructural and Participatory Action Research epistemologies. Methodologically, I carried out semi-structured interviews and focus groups, as well as using other tools such as mapping and story writing. I also spent time ‘hanging out’ at both Rainbow Sky and Bangkok Rainbow, enabling both a deeper appreciation of the work carried out by the organisations as well as providing an opportunity to gather materials. The generation of data did not cease once I left ‘the field’; I continued to produce autoethnographic texts including poetry and a re-search performance which I used both as a method of enquiry and re-presentation of this study. This multifaceted approach enabled diverse questions (emerging across disciplines) to be addressed in my work. To re-present my analyses of participants’ accounts I have celebrated different ways-of-knowing re-search. I have used poetry and consciously performative writing, visual art (including graffiti) and performance alongside traditional scholarly prose. This approach enables multiple voices to emerge all over the page, questioning the hegemony of the bound, straight-lined thesis and the ‘legitimate’ knowledges it generally contains. I argue that queer postgraduate students may be able to open spaces to produce authentic work, despite pressures to perform straight research texts. Yet, pressures to conform to traditional understandings of theses may be painful reminders of their own positions in academia and society. Overall, my study offers intimate, multifaceted perspectives on the agency of MSM development practitioners in Bangkok and my own experience of finding power through queeresearch. I hope it will contribute to more nuanced understandings of local practitioners of MSM development in Queering Development literature, and to scholarship on queer postgraduate students’ experience of re-search more generally.</p>

A ALMA ENCANTADORA DO BECO OU AS CRÔNICAS DE UM VAGABUNDO: ARTE DRAG, PERFORMANCE E URBANIDADES / Alley’s lovely soul or the chronicles of a tramp: art of drag, performance and urbanities

Este texto é uma escrita-performance, inspirada metodologicamente na escrita rizomática de Deleuze e Guattari e na proposta de escrita performativa de Peggy Phellan, uma pesquisa-narrativa que se debruça sobre um espetáculo artístico-cultural de rua, em Salvador (Beco da OFF, Barra), protagonizado por uma artista drag queen da cidade de Salvador, Valerie O’rarah: performance propositadamente artificial e encenada, em que se lança um olhar sobre a noite soteropolitana e aqueles que circulam por ruas, becos e vielas, uma urbe cheia de contradições, encantos e conflitos. A persona encarnada como narrador é a do flâneur, vagabundo e errante urbano relido pela poética baudelairiana e experimentada por João do Rio, Walter Benjamin, entre outros. Esse errante urbano se perde pela metrópole, entre os fluxos e devires dos encontros e possibilidades de uma noite imprevisível: por um instante e um descuido, ele se depara e se encanta com o espetáculo e o contempla. O encontro do flâneur com Valerie O’rarah e essa noite quente e arriscada é uma experiência de choque e de alteridade radical, identidades que se fragmentam e se complementam na multidão misteriosa e soturna da cidade de Salvador.Palavras-chave: Performance; Escrita; Urbanidades; Gênero; Arte drag. AbstractThis text is a performance writing, methodologically inspired by the rhizomatic writing of Deleuze and Guattari and Peggy Phellan’s performative writing proposal, a narrative research that focuses on a street artistic-cultural spectacle in Salvador (Beco da OFF, Barra), starring a drag queen artist from the city of Salvador, Valerie O’rarah: performance, therefore, purposely artificial and contrived, it takes a look at the soteropolitan night and those who wander through its streets and alleys, a metropolis full of contradiction, enchantment and conflicts. The persona being incarnated as the narrator is the flâneur, a wandering tramp reread from Baudelairian poetry as experienced by João do Rio, Walter Benjamin, among others. This urban wanderer loses himself in the metropolis amongst flows and becomings of an exciting and unpredictable night: in a moment of carelessness, he stumbles upon the spectacle and becomes mesmerized. The flâneur’s encounter with Valerie O’rarah and that hot and risky night is an experience of shock and radical otherness, identities that fragment and complement each other in the mysterious and gloomy crowd of the city of Salvador.Keywords: Performance; Writing; Urbanities; Gender; Art of drag.

Picturing the Body

The essays in this Critical Intervention forum continue work on posthumanism in performance studies where the elemental performance tools of body, word, and thing activate studies in materialism, vital materialities, and engagement with non/human others. Through methods of performative writing, these works assist in deepening our potential to understand the intersections of art, materiality, and political intervention.

Five Letters to Georgia O’Keeffe

In her lifetime, US American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) wrote thousands of letters to those closest to her. However, she relied on painting as her primary public voice. This essay takes the form of five letters, composed through posthumanist performative writing,1 addressed to O’Keeffe. I work through the process of experiencing the death of my father in a material landscape as it was painted by O’Keeffe. The southwestern landscapes O’Keeffe painted were the same landscapes in which my father and I negotiated material relations to live a life of what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness.”2

Performative Writing as a Method of Inquiry With the Material World: The Art of the Imperative

Understanding writing as a performative material practice, this paper highlights the “imperative” as a strategy to enhance writing practices in our classrooms and academic workshops. Drawing on posthuman theories and intra-active relationships, it describes how performative arts-based writing can provide a way to engage with the human and nonhuman, the embodied, sensory elements of our writerly worlds. Employing a critical collaborative autoethnographic methodology, the two authors provide a narrative account of a year as two research Fellows in a university exploring writing as a method of inquiry through designing and implementing a series of performative arts-based writing activities.

To Be or Not to Be, That Is the Question: A Journey Through Performance Autoethnography

Across significant moments in my training in performative autoethnography in the United States, I share through performative writing my ideas, experiences, and reflections between the different moments of qualitative research, among which I am in a process of transition that stresses my biography, over cultures and paradigms. In this process, a feminine voice emerges with force silenced by data and traditions. The process makes visible doubts and contradictions of my own, mixed with subjective reflections on the self-construction of the professional identity of becoming a researcher in the academy. The importance of “raising the voice” in a globalized neoliberal context, characterized by capitalism in scientific production and the power that has an impact on research and methods is revealed. This highway traveled serves to stimulate reflection and debate among the academic community of qualitative researchers. Everyday practices are not insensitive to the people who make up academic institutions and spaces, nor do such practices have no impact on the lives of the researchers. I also write to annoy and disturb, to mobilize and question these practices and the relationships between researchers and research, confronting their inter-and-intra spaces with the neoliberal times that we live in the academy. This allows awareness and position with coherence and ethics before qualitative research as responsible social commitment and moral act.

This shoal which is not one: Island studies, performance studies, and Africans who fly

This essay explores variant stories surrounding the 1803 ‘Igbo Landing’ on St. Simons Island, Georgia, in which a group of enslaved Africans mutinied against their captors and ran aground upon a shoal. Following Tiffany Lethabo King and other scholars of Black feminist thought, the essay explores not only the littoral fact of shoals in seafaring but also the concept of shoaling for troubling historical narratives oriented to settler colonial plot points. Following island studies scholar Jonathan Pugh, the essay asks what thinking with performance and the concept of liminality might offer attempts to account for sand, drift, and, in this case, accounts of Africans who fly. The essay also tells a story of its own regarding the author’s attempt to approach the historical site of Igbo Landing by sea. An example of performative writing, the essay does not so much launch and unpack a singular argument as it explores the littoral zones among and between ideas, stories, arguments, facts, and fabulations in relation.