Who Cares?: Ethics and Practices of Care and Making Change in Contemporary Queer Performance Production

Abstract

Queer performance has historically illuminated an imbalance of care for minoritarian concerns and fostered community connections for collective survival and resistance.1 1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). This article interweaves theorisations by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and collaborators in the book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice 2 2. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). and draws upon interviews with key queer cultural producers, practitioners, scholars, and artists currently working in the UK to identify and theorise contemporary ethics and practices of care in their work. It reveals how queer performance practice attempts to address issues of ethnicity, race, class, disability, gender, and gender identity, tokenism and racial representation, access, class, (dis)ability, and trans-inclusivity in generative ways.3 3. Adam Carver, Queering the Sector: Meaningful Change, Meaningful Care, Conference programme, SHOUT! Festival of Queer Arts and Culture, Birmingham Hippodrome, November 8, 2019. Considering the urgent need for material reconfigurations and diversification of the UK arts sector – both in response to and preceding the global COVID-19 pandemic – I argue that an ethics of care and orientation toward action can address ongoing issues around who and what is ‘made to matter’ in queer arts production. Contemporary queer performance praxis in the UK reaches further toward the margins to find new solutions to embed radical care in production practices. As philosopher Rosi Braidotti suggests, such work ‘is enhanced by the rejection of self-centred individualism … [producing] a new way of combining self-interests with the well-being of an enlarged community’.4 4. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 48. Through foregrounding collectivity, community, care, and social justice the queer performance sector is well positioned to be at the forefront of wider cultural production trends, creating, and amplifying change throughout the sector and beyond.