Queer Street Scenes: Interruption, Exception, Orientation

Abstract

How might we think queerly about the politics of performance in public space? Inspired by ‘queer’ as a straying from the straight-and-narrow and by the street as a site of chance meetings and awkward run-ins, I stage in this essay an encounter between two different approaches to thinking the politics of performance in public space. The first approach follows a familiar path: Bertolt Brecht's ‘street scene’ and Walter Benjamin's account of epic theatre. The second approach follows the walking performances of two queer migrant artists – South Korean-born Jisoo Yoo, now based in France, and Mozambican-born Jupiter Child, now based in Denmark – who interrogate the disorientation of the queer migrant body in Western European public space. Exploring the surprisingly busy intersection between the Brechtian street scene and the work of these two artists reveals a politics of performance in public space that favours orientation over rupture.