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.

This chapter examines two inter-Asian festivals that reckon with difficult histories in East Asia: the BeSeTo Theatre Festival and the Gwangju Media Arts Festival. What makes these festivals significant is that they give artists indigenous to the host countries pride of place. Although there are many theatre festivals in East Asia, many bring works from Western auteur directors, drawing audiences largely from elsewhere. These festivals are distinct in promoting exchanges among Asian artists, practicing the dauntingly vast concept that is (inter-)Asian theatre from locally informed and historically specific perspectives. Production examples such as Han Tae-sook’s Princess Dukhye (1995) and Issac Chong Wai’s One Sound of the Futures (2016) demonstrate the potency of festivals in engaging with vexed histories of state violence, Japanese imperialism, and British colonialism that constitute the contemporary relations of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. They render the festivals politically effective platforms where difficult historical memories are addressed and local residents made co-creators. They nurture rather than restrict the social and cultural work that festivals perform.

Although queer Indigenous studies is a new field, there is a growing number of Indigenous-authored and edited critical texts that foreground Indigenous ways of knowing. Interweaving Indigenous ways of knowing – encompassing epistemologies, histories, stories, language, spirituality, legal systems, and artistic practices – with queer Indigenous Studies is integral to Indigenous sovereignty. Using Cree ways of knowing to analyze films of self-described butch lesbian/Two-Spirit filmmaker Thirza Cuthand (Cree) opens up more complex and appropriate understandings of Cuthand’s work. wâhkôhtowin or kinship, interrelatedness, a sense of closeness or intimacy and miyo-wîcêhtowin or the principle of getting along well with others, good relations, and expanding the circle, anchors a specifically Cree reading of Cuthand’s work. Cuthand’s films are not in simply in reaction to colonization and homophobia, but are integral part of wâkhôtowin as she creates community both for herself and for queer Indigenous people.

This chapter examines the wave of smaller performing arts festivals in North America and Europe that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The author argues that this ‘second wave’ of international performing arts festivals prefigured the potential for new social relationships and artistic processes and shifted the event horizon around what constitutes a festival performance. To chart the ‘second wave’ is to diagram larger, systemic transformations from the cultural to creative industries, the rise of the ‘creative city’, and the rupturing of progressive social movements. This chapter links the imaginative realm of site-specific, socially engaged work and the activist realm of movement-building to explore how new forms of relational play exceed the very time of festival. If once international performing arts festivals were recruited to rebuild relations between nations, and later enrolled to bolster the economies of cities, ‘second-wave’ festivals have also shown that they can redistribute their resources to communities and support forms of belonging organized around the practice of place rather than its territorial claim over it.

The National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown – now Makhanda – is South Africa’s largest, longest-lasting, and most prestigious festival. Although other post-apartheid festivals have launched new work, only NAF hosts African, European, and American work alongside local fare mostly in English and in national languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. It has also developed training and employment to offset inequality in the Eastern Cape. While these endeavours to enrich artistic practice, please audiences, and ensure the well-being of ordinary citizens are praiseworthy, NAF sponsors do not fully acknowledge the history of this inequity, which dates from Grahamstown’s founding in 1812 and extends through Anglophile pageants challenging Afrikaner cultural dominance but not the political economy of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century to initially cautious genteel efforts to diversify the festival in the 1980s, which provoked anti-apartheid boycotts. Despite advances since the 1990s, systematic representation of South Africa’s many cultural forms – from African variety through testimonial theatre and township musicals to performance art – was achieved only in the twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses the role of city festivals in shaping and re-imagining urban space. There has been increased interest in festivals among decision-makers and marketers as vehicles for cultural profiling, regeneration, and social inclusion. The chapter views space as inseparable from economic and social structures and practices which govern urban life. It draws attention to the political aspect of city festivals as being mobilized for economic, social, and cultural purposes. It draws on Lefebvre’s and Massey’s conceptualizations of space as socially produced to discuss examples of theatre festivals based in Northern Europe. It shows how, more than simply putting on a show, these festivals aim to infuse the cityscape with new meanings. In doing so, the festivals become implied in (re)configurations of social patterns of representation and marginalization, for example regarding how they open or close urban space to different audiences. The chapter argues that a spatial perspective provides a critical means for examining how festivals organize bodies, social hierarchies, and relations of inclusion and exclusion in the city.

Narrative theory has been used extensively by queer theorists to reconceptualize the cultural workings of sex, gender, and sexuality, not to mention race, nation, indigeneity, and class, among other key categories. This chapter provides an overview of some queer renderings of narrative. The chapter focuses on the interconnections between narrative, sexuality, modernity, and colonialism before considering some dominant narrative genres and queer critical engagements with these: the transition autobiography, the coming out narrative, and the “progress” narrative, explored at the level of the individual and of the collective and historical. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the uses of some of these narrative forms in the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in the Republic of Ireland.

This chapter’s analysis of Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS and CAMINOS festivals in Toronto, Canada, examines the ways in which these grassroots festivals harness the power of an interactional, mass gathering to generate a ‘theatrical commons’ grounded in a heterogeneous, intercultural Americas. Since their inauguration in 2012, the festivals feature and foster co-productions with Latin American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean artists from across the Americas as a way of generating alternative producing structures to foster hemispheric work and, in turn, alternative genealogies of Canadian performance history. The ‘theatrical commons’ generated by the alternating biennials of RUTAS and CAMINOS produces new social relations grounded in interculturalization rather than internationalization, offering a model of how festivals might advance forms of interculturalization as an ‘inter-epistemology’ with the potential to unravel colonial thinking and domination. These festivals play a critical role in reshaping the Canadian performance landscape and demonstrating how festivals can redirect transnational flows of knowledge and artistic production towards more inclusive practices.