Contemporary queer activism and scholarship builds on foundational work by women of color feminists, black feminists, and black gay artists. Anthologies and films, including This Bridge Called My Back edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and Tongues Untied directed by Marlon Riggs, created languages and practices about difference and care that were central to organizing around AIDS. Working across difference, an organizing principle that pursues shared, liberatory goals without presuming a shared identity, requires creating coalitions within and across national borders that are attentive to the most vulnerable populations. Working across difference also depends on care work – the unglamorous, uncompensated practices of mutual aid, including nursing and mourning. Care work is the often invisible labor that sustained AIDS organizing, particularly as it was performed by grieving gays and lesbians, unable to participate in more visible public actions. As practices central to the emergence of queer politics and cultural production, working across difference and care work remains indispensable to imagining and pursuing freedom.

This chapter presents queer and trans popular culture studies through a 2015 plotline on the US soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Maya Avant, a character introduced several years previously, is revealed to be a trans woman. I consider Maya’s story within both the specific context of the soap genre and the supposed phenomenon known as the “transgender tipping point” toward visibility and civil rights. Aiming to denaturalize argumentation as the goal of academic essays, I offer instead an analysis of Maya’s story in the service of a common fan cultural production: a new scenario dreamed up for the characters. Soap conventions normalize hidden pasts and bodily transformations, and B and B writers well used those conventions to de-scandalize trans genders. But they also evacuated and depoliticized Maya’s backstory. Maya first appeared on the show as a black woman newly released from unjust incarceration, separated from her child in the process, and struggling to survive in the heteropatriarchal, racist carceral state. I want B and B to revisit Maya’s history, dramatizing the role of mass incarceration in the lives of trans people, and particularly trans people of color.

The Arab region has boasted an enormous range of theatre festivals throughout the last three decades. The most important ones, Carthage Theatre Days and Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre, are organized under the auspices of government institutions such as ministries of culture. These temporary events are often caught within an ambiguous compromise; that is, the paradox of sanctioning dominant power structures through heightening the continuum of normal time while subverting hierarchies by interrupting the flow of life. The focus of the present undertaking, however, is more a revisiting of the most visible festivals after the Arab Spring, and the current theatrical co-motion. Concepts such as ‘theatrical co-motion’ (Al-Hirak Al-Masrahiy) have gained new momentum among young performers within the context of the recent popular protests (Al-Hirak Chaibi). Despite the fact that most of these organized events are instrumentalized to control dissent, they are also scenes whereupon revolutionary praxis and detour are mapped.

“Trace a Vanishing” provides an account of the interrelation between the fields of queer and performance studies by way of the particular intersectionality of black queer performance. Noting alliances between the fields’ investments in repetition, gesture, and disciplinary profligacy, the chapter goes on to linger with notions of vanishing and presence as a way of thinking about the particularities black queer performative figuration. The poignancy and complexity introduced by the black queer performer attempting to “restore” their behavior – in the parlance of performance studies – is only amplified by the possibility of disappearance to which these performers are almost always gesturing. Critics of black queer performance must devise methods for following the line of performances that, like all performances, vanish, but unlike most performances, bring to mind the complex and violent histories, and sometimes necessary impulses, of vanishing.

This chapter examines the intersection of regionalisms and queer studies with special attention to US literary studies. It asks what difference, if any, queer critical regionalism as an intellectual approach may make in analyses of literature of the imperial center. Attempting to answer this question, the chapter revisits a short story that depicts queer love – “The Queen’s Twin” (1899) – by Sarah Orne Jewett, a US regionalist writer who has figured prominently in both scholarship on US literary regionalism and queer studies. By analyzing this story, the chapter demonstrates the potential of queer critical regionalism as an approach that both encourages comparative and transnational queer studies research and enables reevaluation of texts like Jewett’s that have hitherto been understood as foundational to a queer Western literary canon.

This chapter charts the Australian international arts festival network to demonstrate how it operates as part of a decentralised national theatre and to suggest how this local network operates as part of a broader global arts producer and market. By commissioning, producing, and disseminating new, distinctively Australian work of international standard, this network nationalizes the performing arts repertoire and creates a space in which to explore the ambiguities and cultural conflict inherent in nation-building projects. Rather than being insular and inward-looking, constructing national identity in the context of international arts festivals is necessarily conducted in relation to other countries and identities and is outward-facing to both reflect and position ‘brand Australia’ in the global marketplace. Part of the goal of this national network is to facilitate the transmission of Australian cultural product abroad, on the one hand, and to showcase productions from around the world that are similarly representing their local cultures, on the other.

This chapter begins with an overview of international festivals in the region before moving into a detailed examination of the often-competing dynamics and complexities operating within today’s Latin American theatre festival. The chapter centres on two of the region’s major festivals – Chile’s annual Santiago a Mil Festival and Argentina’s biannual Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires – in order to illustrate fundamental differences that range from origins to institutional and funding structures to programming decisions and even to individual festivals’ varied relationships to the international cultural marketplace. Albeit easily dismissed as ‘encuentros vitrina’ (display- or show-case encounters), and despite having cemented a professional and commercial inter-festival relationship in recent years, the two festivals converge and diverge significantly, thus offering insights into the challenges and opportunities found in contemporary Latin American theatre festivals when positioned within the international festival circuits.

Through an examination of Henrique Cirne-Lima and Josué Pellot’s 2010 documentary film I Am the Queen about transgender Puerto Rican beauty queen pageants in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, this chapter discusses how queer diasporic communities in the US navigate family and kinship in light of racial, sexual, and gender difference. Underscoring the importance of decentering conventional notions of kinship while remaining attuned to the way “given” families may in fact link up to “selected” families for purposes of communal sustenance and endurance, the chapter highlights the film’s aim to represent alternative formations of family and kinship as they relate to diaspora and displacement. Ultimately, Cirne-Lima and Pellot’s film offers a vision of the struggle to belong in the context of the loving competition of the beauty pageant while also accounting for the struggles of historically marginalized and maligned communities such as the transgender Puerto Rican women the documentary represents.

This chapter traces the history of European festivals from Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth (with its professed inspiration in the Festival of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens) through the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Avignon, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Festival of Athens and Epidaurus, to the Théâtre des Nations and its successor, Germany’s Theatre der Welt. Examining festival repertoires, it traces an evolution of the representation of difference and the relationship between the international repertoire and the local, settling finally on the 2017 Hamburg edition of Theater der Welt and asking: can an international theatre festival still be a place and a site for community-building and transformation? Examining the supposed ‘global aesthetics’ in evidence in Hamburg’s rigorous deployment of the local, it argues that the political and the aesthetic at festivals necessarily become inextricably entangled.

What is transgender studies, and what are its major methods? While the field itself is oriented against definitive answers to such questions, transgender studies does indeed possess a history and an emergent set of critical tools, both similar to and yet divergent from the more institutionally embraced field of queer studies. Drawing on Janet Halley’s early mapping of each field’s claims as well as Susan Stryker’s characterization of transgender studies as queer theory’s “evil twin,” this chapter explores the critical relation enacted between the two fields, tracing relevant points of congruence and tension between their methods. Both like and yet unlike queer studies, trans* studies points up queer theory’s limitations while inverting many of its major premises. Rather than envisioning the fields as opposites, however, this chapter seeks to clarify their relation as a fruitful paradox in which each discourse problematizes and yet enlivens the other’s claims. It then concludes by demonstrating some of trans* studies’ core methods through a close reading of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

From long before recorded Western history to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the world have engaged in ceremonies and communal performance activities – the White Earth scroll, the corroboree, the potlach – that could not without diminishment be called ‘theatre’, but are certainly performative and might, from a Western perspective, be called festivals. This chapter asks what it might mean for scholars to consider festivals to have begun, not in the competitive framework of the Festival of Dionysus in ancient Greece, but in the relational context of Indigenous ‘internation’ exchange. It traces the history of trans-Indigenous festivals, interrupted by colonization, to the present day, visiting Indigenous cultural festivals in Australia and the Pacific, and ending with accounts of Native Earth Performing Arts’ Weesageechak Begins to Dance (Toronto), Full Circle Performing Arts’ Talking Stick Festival (Toronto), and Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s Living Ritual Festival (Toronto).

This chapter theorizes francophone international theatre festivals as sites of cultural struggle where aesthetic judgements are negotiated alongside political agendas via notions of human universalism and cultural difference. It explores how artists from France’s former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean navigate the festival circuit: how they are categorized and how they resist, subvert, benefit from, and transform festival structures. The first part focuses on the precarious positioning of post-colonial artists on Avignon’s mainstages. The second examines the festivals, in Limoges and New York, that played major roles in constructing an image of ‘Francophone theatre’, a term associated with non-French, often post-colonial, French-language playwrights. Lastly, a brief history of Aimé Césaire’s Festival of Fort-de-France, positioned in opposition to the presumed centrality of France, illuminates how this Caribbean-based festival repurposes French notions of republican universalism. It concludes by gesturing towards recent festivals as new models for cultural exchange that circumvent France to support works by African writers and foster civic participation.

This chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework of queer ecology – which interrogates the relationship between the categories of “queerness” and “nature.” In the first section, Seymour traces this framework’s history and deployment by academics, artists, and activists, and also attends to its oversights. She argues that queer ecology has made foundational, though sometimes underrecognized, contributions to the larger nonhuman turn in the humanities. The second section turns to primary sources, using queer ecology and the related framework of trans ecology to read two works of contemporary US literature, Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poetry collection The Spectral Wilderness (2015). Seymour shows how Abbey’s novel tries, unsuccessfully, to oppose the transformativity of nature to the transformativity of sex and gender; meanwhile, Bendorf’s poetry offers an alternative to this line of thought by drawing innovative parallels between the category of the vegetal and the transgender human body.

This chapter reflects on theorizations of “queer diasporas” through an analysis of Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt (2003). A crucial, though not uncontested, concept, “queer diaspora” investigates the global circulations and alterations of “queer” practices, identities, and economies as well as the incommensurate meanings and valuations of nonnormative gender-sexual formations across disparate geopolitical locations. The Book of Salt illustrates and complicates these precepts by rewriting the story of expatriate modernism in Paris from the perspective of a queer, exiled, Vietnamese cook employed in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon. The novel’s portrayals of queer diasporic crossings in Saigon and Paris refuse presumptions of queer commonality across social hierarchies as well as teleological narratives of gender-sexual liberation in the move from colony to metropole, while insisting on the narrator’s persistent pursuit of his queer desires in the face of repeated betrayal and nonreciprocity. It thus becomes the reader’s ethical obligation to respond sympathetically to the narrator’s temporally impossible call and recognize his subjective account.