Review: Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer ed. by Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier (original) (raw)

. Queer Dramaturgies is an expansive collection of essays that do the difficult labour of analysing that thing: performance's potential to recalibrate and reposition an audience. Like Shildrick, the book's authors are genuinely captivated by the performances about which they write. Through their bodies and situated epistemologies, they experience collective queer potential in the undoing of normative regimes of gender and sexual knowledge. Queer Dramaturgies is a current and diverse collection of essays on contemporary queer performance that updates the canon of queer theatre without privileging the United States as the centre of queer cultural production. The authors focus on a range of theatrical media as a means of developing queer theory by asking, "Where can performance lead queer?" Performance is not merely an object of analysis; it is also a way of doing queer scholarship that is enacted by the contributors when, for example, Nando Messias lipsyncs to Judith Butler's voice in an academic presentation, Eliza Steinbock signs a contract to bear witness to Doran George's live installation, and in a play presented at an academic conference, Amahl Khouri and her cast theorize the stakes of making queer Lebanese women's theatre. The inclusion of thick descriptions, performative writing, interviews, audience responses, and script excerpts in this collection nuance and diversify what we understand as theatre scholarship. In addition to excavating the scholarly value of performance, these interventions open the academy to queer forms of knowledge, as well as queer tastes, pleasures, desires, subjectivities, and bodies.