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.

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.