Diffractive Co-conspiracy in Queer, Crip Live Art Production

Abstract

While equality, inclusivity, diversity and accessibility now regularly appear in mainstream discourse, the UK’s Equality Act (2010) paradoxically preceded a year-on-year increase in recorded cases of hate crime and discrimination based on protected characteristics such as (perceived) gender identity, sexuality and disability (Home Office 2019). A hostile environment is manifest through the ongoing cuts to Universal Credit (Schraer 2020) and the trans moral panic (Barker 2017) around the Gender Recognition Act, creating urgent times (Haraway 2016) in need of response-able address. These trends suggest that visibility and “awareness raising” are no panacea for discrimination, a matter requiring urgent critical attention. Using the lens of my research around LGBTQIA+ (queer), disabled-led (crip) live art as disidentificatory praxis (Muñoz 1999) I demonstrate how the emerging feminist new materialist methodology of co-conspiracy (de los Santos-Upton 2017) is already being effectively applied by performance art professionals to revolutionise the industry. This diffractive, response-able methodology and praxis has the potential to expose and resist the structural, institutional, political, environmental and social inequalities that queer, disabled individuals continue to face. My multimodal interdisciplinary analysis provides insight into the precarious alterity of queer, crip live artists in continuingly inaccessible/impenetrable social and artistic settings and the emancipatory political potential of applied diffraction as an action oriented rhizomatic ontology. Dissecting the entangled nature of queerness and disability, of in/visibility and making the personal public as many queer disabled artists do, this paper explores the tensions in producing radically challenging, self-exposing works that also serve as affective and affirmative provocations, poignant acts of resistance and of defiant survival. Unpacking how queer, crip identified live artists reconfigure connections by building and sharing productive tools to disassemble politics and practices of exclusion, this paper posits that diffractive co-conspiracy might be used as a productive methodology to create revolutionary communities of practice able to resist the commodification and commercialisation of live art production and wider social and political marginalisation.