Performing the Contruction of Queer Spaces (original) (raw)
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Queer Urbanism deserves a place in any sort of conversation about our built world, examining how we traverse, alter and think about our relationship with cities. Rebellious movements in the past such as Dadaism, Situationism and Fluxus gave free reign to artistic practicesin our cities by merely occupying space on the sidewalks. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s brought the LGBTQ+ community into the spotlight, at that point, ACT UP! and Queer Nation implemented performative protest, taking back the streets for a marginalized community. The fine/performing arts have upheld this practice of subverting public space. But what do these actions signify? Beyond the "city as a stage", we see them for what they are: seismic changes in the urban fabric. The planning of cities and streets takes place within the safe confines of an office; however, this paper argues that urban design should not be approached without taking the uses of the spaces into consideration. Combining the disruptive methods of Queer Theory, Queer Urbanism is much more than a protest. It is a recognition beyond "We're Here! We're Queer!": "We're here! Now this is queer!" In its contradictory nature, Queer Urbanism fights back the heteronormative patriarchal power system that shapes our cities. But will it cannabalize itself? A popular talking point for queer space is the "safe space", yet if we hold a critical queer lens to this, does queer fight for safety? Is it not born from a desire to design, redesign and reconstruct the idea of what most people consider safe? This paper tackles various works of artistic practices, both historical and contemporary, with a special eye to how they changed a given space by occupying it, if even only for a brief moment. As queer bodies move through a space, are we defining that space? Or are we designing the space?
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In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed explains that precarity is akin to a vase on the mantelpiece. If it were pushed even slightly, it would fall off the edge. Existence on that edge, Ahmed explains, is what we allude to when we discuss precarious populations. Patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia are violent forces. They threaten to push us over the edge. Queer performance often begins in this in-between state on the mantelpiece, not quite fallen, not quite stable, negotiating, and straddling a balance between holding on to a fragile state and falling off the mantle entirely. In this article, I analyze the Queer Pride Inside Cabaret (June 2020), the first official partnership between Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the largest and longest running queer theatre in the world, and the CBC, a Canadian federal Crown corporation and national public broadcaster. In considering the mainstream producers and the radical queer artists showcased, I refuse a simplistic antinormative/ normative binary in queer performance in Canada and make space for accessing resources from the mainstream, while rejecting inequitable systems of oppression. If queer theatre is intended to break down ingrained static and naturalized assumptions of everyday practices, how do we understand queer performance through contradictions and incoherence? Can we simultaneously fuck the system and accept our complicity within it? Complicating the unique and diverse ways artists opt-in and out of mainstream queer presence, this article looks at creative practices that challenge and promote continuing legacies and failures of queer performance in Canada.
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Definitely an "early" work and planning to expand it. Comments of all sorts welcomed! "My study attempts to map out moments of the complexity of Montreal's so-called gay male strip clubs. Accordingly, I take a stroll through Montreal's "gay village" and investigate one of its clubs, i.e. its exterior, its interior design, its architecture the overlapping flows within the club, the rules and laws that constrain some of those flows, and the dancers themselves, altogether as a certain technè serving homoerotic desire. Moreover, in the light of this study, I propose a critique of the concept of gay space and suggest its reworking."
Out In The Club: 'Day for Night' as Queer Space and Time
‘Day for Night’ (Performance Space, Sydney, 13 - 15 February 2014 & 20 - 22 February 2015), is a serial event presenting durational performances as both an exhibition and a dance party. This paper will argue the event is both a consequence and an extension of queer space and times. The curatorial framing of the event is understood as both a celebration and an expression of artistic practice, queer sexuality, and the Sydney performance scenes. The event’s curatorial framing is discussed in relation to internationally acclaimed festival director and curator Zvonimir Dobrović’s concept of vertical and horizontal curatorial programming. This will provide an interpretive strategy, further informed by discussions of queer temporality, to understand how the performances and practices in this event create a new language for communicating queer histories. The curatorial rationale makes explicit the interrelationship of time, space, and sexuality to the event. As such, I argue the event can be usefully understood in relation to concepts of ‘the scene’ as well as how bodies are implicated and embodied in the spaces of the event, namely as bodies which sweat or don’t. Scenes and sweaty bodies provide a means to understand how the event’s practices both make and remake queer identity, community, and performance practices. Such an understanding, acknowledges this as a history of the present, and that such strange temporal conjunctions, foregrounds the role of the researcher and event’s participants in the co-creation of tomorrow’s queer cultural ecologies.
International Conference / "Queer Urban Nights"
EROSS (Dublin City University) - Fringe Urban Narratives (Universidad de Alcalà), 2022
Intervento intitolato: "The City Night as a Space of Transgression and Identity Redefinition in 'Altri libertini' by Pier Vittorio Tondelli". The night time is experienced within the urban context as a strongly diversified and diversifying time, as compared to the patterns of life and behaviour characteristic of daytime diachrony. Freeing, at least temporarily, the city space from exclusive productive and functional tasks, the night, as a temporality open to a constant renegotiation between subjectivity and otherness, tampers with the regularity and canonicity of interpersonal relationships to become the theatre of new forms of sexuality, communication, identity transgression. In the light of Bachtin's concepts of chronotope of the encounter and chronotope of the road, inextricably linked to each other, and at the same time reasoning on the Foucaltian definition of heterotopia, the paper intends to analyse the expressive modalities, the linguistic resources and the thematic continuities through which the nocturnal city becomes in the stories contained in 'Altri libertini' (1980) – first book of Pier Vittorio Tondelli – not only a privileged scenography of the events narrated, but a real mythopoietic space, a representative constant that the author investigates, probes in depth and re-elaborates narratively according to an authorial filter of zero degree, mimetically adhering to the characters and scenes told. Helping us then with Augé's reflections on the nature of non-places, our interest is to investigate the process of re-semantisation for which the nocturnal places that act as a field of tension of diegetic actions – stations, night refreshments, clubs – are transformed into counter-spaces, marginal environments intended exclusively for those individuals whose behaviour turns out to be apparently deviant and transgressive, as compared to the canonical social norms accepted and shared in a certain historical period, to the point of becoming a vehicle for sexual liberation - but also a dimension of traumas and existential tragedies, as well as a palimpsest in which processes of identity redefinition are continuously re-written.