Queer Performance and Performativities

Abstract

This section of QED is dedicated to the documentation and illumination of events/performances/happenings in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTTQ) communities. In particular, the construction of “queer performance and performativities” reference that set of activities in/of/as related to LGBTTQ communities; a diverse range of activities relevant to intersecting academia and activism in a LGBTTQ worldmaking project. Such events/performances might include, but are not limited to, solo and performance art across a range of genres, reviews of films or film festivals, concerts, exhibitions, theater, television events; documentation of protests, marches, queer occupy actions, critiques of headlining events, and conferences. Queer performance is constructed in the broadest sense of embodied/engaged activity with the intent to celebrate or illuminate the practices, politics, and polemics of LGBTTQ lives; performativities are critical interventions in the repetitive regimes of the normal that inspire the impulse of queer activism and the politics of being LGBTTQ. In this inaugural issue, the three section editors offer three important meditations on queer performance and performativities. In his performance review, Madison Moore introduces us to the queer punk performances of SSION, a Kansas City-bred art and music collective led by mad scientist Cody Critcheloe. SSION, whose sonic landscape is a little bit retro and a little bit camp, creates a unique queer subcultural universe, one that critiques the possibilities of queerness from within the purview of queerness. We are led through a discussion of a  SSION performance at a New York gallery called The Hole before we go to