Performing Queer Modernism

Abstract

Focusing on some of the best-known stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, while also suggesting that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Loie Fuller’s Fire Dance, Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and Djuna Barnes’s metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove explore manifestations, facets, and dimensions of and suggest ways of reading—and of viewing earlier “readers” reading—queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist and how their coproductive intersection was articulated in and through performance. The book contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relationship between performance history and the history of sexuality. In doing so, it adds to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain underrepresented. It also contributes to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative and more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.