Concerning the queer refugee: Staceyann Chin’s transient performance

Abstract

Poet, performance artist, and activist, Staceyann Chin has created with her daughter Zuri an on-line “Living Room Protest” series. This work provides a focus to discuss the queer refugee and facilitates a broader inquiry into the spatial and temporal dimensions of transient performance as expressed through a digital platform. The Chins’ collaboration destabilizes assumed oppositions between child and adult, public and private, citizen and refugee. Their performances further investigate notions of home and subjectivity by highlighting some of the contradictions that obtain in relation to discourses of forced migration and related claims for asylum. Although the short videos of the protest series recall certain elements from Staceyann Chin’s larger oeuvre (specifically her spoken word performances, her solo theater shows, and her published writings), this dialogic form presented on YouTube participates in and potentially reshapes one particular family’s role in a public sphere constructed through new media.