“I’m asking, queer 2 queer: are we family?”: Reflections on Canada’s First National Queer Theatre and Performance Conference

Abstract

The editors of Canadian Theatre Review invited bisexual, genderqueer playwright, performer, and curator Katie Sly to offer their reflections on participating in Q2Q, Canada’s first national symposium on queer theatre and performance. In their article, “I’m asking, queer 2 queer: are we family?” Katie examines the charged and contentious energy of the conference, and offers that within queer performance circles, there is not sufficient inter-generational understanding, and there is not enough of a universally aligned perspective on how racism, ableism, and transphobia are enacted in queer spaces, for queer theatre professionals across this country to call each other kin. Rather than seeing this as a failing of the queer performance community or Q2Q, however, Katie posits that contentions that arose at Q2Q are a direct indication of why this national symposium was necessary, and that the repetition of Q2Q is an essential component in building a more compassionate, empathetic, and aware queer performance community, in which we can honour our personal biographies of struggle and oppression surrounding being queer, while also realizing that our biographies do not divorce us from systemic advantages based on race, being cisgender, and other visible and invisible identities.