“What are you trying to say?”— “I’m saying it”

Abstract

This chapter considers Djuna Barnes’s 1923 metatheatrical parodies To the Dogs and The Dove to suggest that the audience for queer modernist performance was not limited to past spectators but has also encompassed later critics and theorists, and that the work’s impact has extended beyond its original context into the present moment, shaping critical discourse in modernist studies. Barnes’s plays have been regarded by some as dramatic failures, but in fact they deliberately thwart conventional representational tropes and dynamics to stage critiques of gendered and sexualized narrative structures and scopic economies. Reprinted in key anthologies of modernist literature, the plays have become research and teaching resources that have contributed to the development of feminist and queer modernist studies. As such, they have “performed” even though they remain mostly unperformed, exemplifying the performativity of queer modernist theatre not only in its original historical context but also across time.