Abstract
This essay explores drag as a strategy of both performative and temporal transitivity in the staging of queer public memories relating to the history of HIV and AIDS in the Americas. I focus on two drag/performance couples whose embodied engagements with past losses to the AIDS pandemic are registered not just through the citational labour of the drag performer but also through the theatrical incitement of the audience toward a kind of queer political (re)call. Applying the concept of an intergenerational drag hail to an examination of Montreal-based 2boys.tv’s Tightrope and Vancouver-based Zee Zee Theatre’s Tucked and Plucked, I discuss how both works channel an historical archive of grief and loss around AIDS that simultaneously becomes a future-oriented act of repertory remembrance.
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‘The Main’ is the name by which locals refer to Saint-Laurent Boulevard, which traditionally marked the dividing line between Montréal’s French (east) and English (west) communities. Now increasingly gentrified, for years the street’s gathering places and restaurants welcomed successive immigrant communities. The Main was also the heart of Montréal’s red light district and a magnet for sexual minorities, something celebrated by Québécois playwright Michel Tremblay in Sainte Carmen de la Main (1976), to which the title of Deir’s play is an obvious homage.
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See, as well, Lee Edelman (2004) and Judith (Jack) Halberstam (2005). Within the context of this volume, it is worth noting that Halberstam states: ‘Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly at the end of the twentieth century, from within the gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic’ (2).
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Acknowledgements
Deep gratitude to Stephen Lawson, Aaron Pollard, Alexis O’Hara, Dave Deveau and Cameron Mackenzie for the work and for talking with me about it. Thanks, as well, to T.L. Cowan for the video documentation of Tightrope.
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Dickinson, P. (2018). ‘Still (Mighty) Real’: HIV and AIDS, Queer Public Memories, and the Intergenerational Drag Hail. In: Campbell, A., Gindt, D. (eds) Viral Dramaturgies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70317-6_5
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