Pride and Shame: Developments in the Performance of Queer Protest

Abstract

If queer protest’s theatrical manoeuvres in the 1970s and 1980s described the desire — to paraphrase Ian Lucas (1994) — to make ‘playing with identities’ the site of political action, more recent performative activism has turned to examine an increasingly commercialised public square, and the kind of queer community which might be possible there. Though this chapter describes a shift from a primary focus on identifiable issues (such as the age of consent) to less directly politicised celebrations of community and LGBT culture, I do not wish to suggest a clean transition, where one set of priorities or techniques replaces another. Rather, the history offered here describes the intersection of different logics of representation and performative action to consider where practitioners have, variously, sought to occupy dominant norms in order to subvert their terms, to refuse dominant terms in order to starve them of their strength, or imagined the possible reiteration of sexuality beyond those dominant terms (Butler, 2000, p. 177). While previous chapters have acknowledged the political ambitions of queer performance practice, it has primarily approached that work through the lens of theatre studies. The following discussion of the performance of queer protest might then be understood as inverting that emphasis, shifting from the politics of performance to the performance of politics, informed by a history of (often consciously theatrical) interventions in public spaces.