This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from subcultural to mainstream politics; from utopian political aspirations (Afrofuturism; cyberfeminism; cyberqueer) to commercialization; and from identity play and performance to consumer authentication. It concludes by drawing out the contradictory dimensions of queer digital culture which both exacerbate forms of oppression and offer liberatory trajectories. Alongside the rise of new forms of heteroactivism, commodified identities, and ubiquitous but unequal digital access, LGBTQ+ digital media continues to offer the promise of solidarity and intervention in relation to social justice.

This synesthetic chapter enacts listens for queer poetics in theory, queer theory in poetics. Divers semantic, physical, and spatial positions swerve on formal constraint, and in the swerves, skrrts, and twerks that streak verses, piss, ideas, and tire tracks across this chapter, a sense of the range of queer desire emerges. Written with a viscerally formal, Caribbean, Latinx, Diasporic Black Poetics imaginary, this chapter waters the unruly growths of (indigenous, black, and insurgent) geographic and grammatical grounds.

The Under the Radar festival is the result of the politics of a time and place that were reset by 9/11. That is when the USA finally learned that it is not invulnerable at home and that its alliances in art, culture, science, and industry are fundamental to its well-being. Situated at Astor Place, a neighbourhood at the crossroad between New York’s East and West Village, Under the Radar is part of a long history of a place that maps part of the story of American immigration, architecture, urban decay and renewal, the economy, and theatre. The festival pivoted away from American exceptionalism towards the interdependence of the neo-liberal economy by accentuating transnationalism in the context of globalization. Greenwich Village’s intellectual and artistic vibrancy has a history of being in conversation with ideas and experimentation originating in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Under the Radar draws upon and adds to this legacy of place through its presentation of work from all over the world. Diversity at Under the Radar signifies ‘this is us’, not in the sense of either multiculturalism or sameness, but of an inquiry of ideas that shapes our shared human destiny.

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.

International theatre festivals are now a dominant phenomenon and have significantly influenced global theatre production since the 1980s. Against the backdrop of post-colonial criticism over the last three decades, the initial post-Second World War function of festivals to represent various national, mostly European cultures has gradually shifted towards festivals as co-producers of international work. Therefore, festivals appear as influential players in professional networks to establish and circulate aesthetic approaches in contemporary theatre practice. Due to the lack of sources on international festivals in archives and theatre collections, the chapter examines the possibilities and challenges of documenting these new modes of production and mobility in theatre archives. Focusing on to the complex professional network around the Philippines-based choreographer and performance artists Eisa Jocson and the role of Zürcher Theater Spektakel within this network, the chapter argues that digital media and data online for international co-production reveals the complex structures of professional networks and should be considered in research on international theatre festivals in a digital age.

Queer of color critique emerged from within and across the epistemic fractures created by a set of late twentieth-century projects – such as queer studies, postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and feminist studies – that forcibly made visible the western settler-colonial white-male heterosexual social order that both liberal and radical critiques privileged, perpetuated, or ignored. It contributed to these interdisciplinary fields by stressing the co-constitutive weave of normalizing power, examined by post-structuralist queer critiques, with social and state dominative powers, which have been the focus of women of color and third world feminist critiques of heteropatriarchy, the “feminization” of transnationalized labor, and state/carceral management of de- and post-industrialization. Queer of color critiques identify aesthetics and politics that defy liberal and radical conceptions of engaged social critique and the (hetero)normative field of the “political” they enfranchise, secure, circulate, and expand through state apparatuses that violate and stigmatize our varied relatedness.

This chapter offers a Foucauldian genealogy of queer theory, which does not stabilize origins, but rather probes incommensurabilities within the field, centers the element of chance that allowed certain theories to become central, and allows for the formation of new roots to the side of those canonized for “founding” a field. Assessing the influence of three major figures – Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michel Foucault – as well as psychoanalytic theory, the first section asks what theoretical orientations each of these figures brought to the field of queer theory and how those orientations influenced later queer theorists. The chapter then turns to queer theorists who self-consciously sought alternative intellectual roots for the field and claimed new founding figures, largely in a bid to center racialized populations and/or geopolitical locations outside of Euro-North America. The ambition of this chapter is to simultaneously account for the generativity of particular theorists and theories – sometimes for critics whose political stakes and objects of study could not be more different – while leaving the field open to the claiming of new genealogies.

This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.