Performative Act Research Articles

Animal Drag

This essay proposes Animal Drag as an activist performance in which a human critically and consciously performs animality to de-centre the human. Dress and adornment are key to its dissidence. Animal Drag’s potential is demonstrated through an analysis of Terry Notary’s performance of a nonhuman primate within Ruben Östlund’s 2017 film The Square. Drawing on posthuman studies, scholarship on subordinated groups and from the field of animal studies, the reading of this performance shows how Animal Drag inherently queers humanist and essentialist notions of classification, particularly the human / animal divide. Paying homage to drag, the essay demonstrates how the material and social semiotics of performance can render transparent the constructions of race, coloniality, ability, and gender, as much as species — in other words, “doing human”. Through theories of dress and prosthesis, highlighting how techne facilitates in-between and “becoming” states, and affect theory, this article argues that humans and nonhumans might share vulnerabilities via Animal Drag. Culture is understood through language and dress, which have been mobilised to construct Otherness. As such, this essay posits that Animal Drag should take place within capitalist Culture industries, as both weapons and targets, to undress powers present and performed. Animal Drag is offered as both practice and theory, content and form.

‘Je te crois’ (‘I believe you’): Pragmatics of a feminist slogan, or silencing and the scene of address in post-#MeToo France

In the context of a failure of #MeToo in France and in light of the intrinsic limitations of this movement, ‘I believe you’ has become one of the battle cries of contemporary French feminism, appearing on protest signs during activist performances and demonstrations, but also on street-pastings disseminated in urban spaces by grassroots feminist collectives. Through a pragmatic analysis of this statement-slogan paradoxically addressed to everyone singularly and to no one in particular, this article demonstrates the performative dimension of post-#MeToo French feminism which aims at once to individually repair and collectively denounce the wrong caused by the silencing of victims of sexual and gender-based violence. Building on Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophical elaboration of the phrastic mechanisms at stake in negationism, as well as feminist scholarship on believability, to demonstrate how the pragmatics of silencing throws survivors into a state of social death, I show how ‘I believe you’ – through the interplay of first- and second-person pronouns – allows the re-subjectivation of individual survivors who encounter it serendipitously in public spaces. Turning to the contextual analysis of activist configurations that have recently mobilized ‘je te crois’ in public space, I then show how this slogan creates feminist counter-spaces where the vulnerability of assembled bodies becomes the site of political subversion.

Kafka’s Ape Meets the Natyashastra

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures.

From Witnessing to Redress: Objects, Remnants, and Wreckage after the Sewol

Abstracts: On April 16, 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized off the southwestern coast of South Korea, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The incident traumatized Koreans, who helplessly watched the capsized ferry sink on live news. The Korean government's (mis)handling of the disaster and its aftermaths made the sinking of the Sewol Ferry the most galvanizing event in contemporary South Korean history. In the wake of the Sewol, activists and artists created memorials in honor of the victims—or rather their absence—as well as their loved ones who remember them. Using critical scholarship from memory studies and performance studies with ethnographic methodologies, this essay explores three of these works, combining tools of close reading and participant observation. In analyzing the three works, I focus on their strategic use of physical objects belonging to victims or their loved ones—namely, childhood artifacts, a blanket, and a bus. Through these objects, activists and artists go beyond an invitation to witness the Sewol and its tragic aftermaths; rather, they index the sustained nature of loss as well as critique the persistence of government malfeasance and unaccountability. Ultimately, I theorize the three case studies as activist performances that animate the material remains of disaster in the service of materializing truth and redress.

Performing Fat Liberation: Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’s Affective Politics and Archive

This article uses collaborative auto/ethnography to explore the circulation and potentiality of affect in the live performances and archive of Pretty Porky and Pissed Off (PPPOd), a Toronto-based queer fat activist performance art collective active during the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Drawing on video and audio recordings of five PPPOd performances alongside other performance ephemera and a series of conversations relating to these archival objects among the article’s three authors, we identify and theorize our affective responses to and situated recollections of these performances, both in their current form as archival objects and as historical live events. We argue that PPPOd’s archival objects/live performances disrupt the constellation of affects that constitute fat hate (e.g., fear, loathing, shame) and set in motion more affirmative affects (e.g., playfulness, pride, desire, love) that contribute to micro-worldings and prefigurative fat politics, as ephemeral as these might be. In capturing these fleeting moments of radical possibility, PPPOd’s activism and archive offer opportunities for touching and feeling a future where fat lives are more livable.

Tool or Actor? Expert Improvisers' Evaluation of a Musical AI “Toddler”

Abstract In this article, we introduce the coadaptive audiovisual instrument, CAVI. This instrument uses deep learning to generate control signals based on muscle and motion data of a performer's actions. The generated signals control time-based live sound-processing modules. How does a performer perceive such an instrument? Does it feel like a machine learning–based musical tool? Or is it an actor with the potential to become a musical partner? We report on an evaluation of CAVI after it had been used in two public performances. The evaluation is based on interviews with the performers, audience questionnaires, and the creator's self-analysis. Our findings suggest that the perception of CAVI as a tool or actor correlates with the performer's sense of agency. The perceived agency changes throughout a performance based on several factors, including perceived musical coordination, the balance between surprise and familiarity, a “common sense,” and the physical characteristics of the performance setting.

Mapping and Cross-mapping the Hi:story of Performance Art in Switzerland through Collective Research for Deviant Understandings

The essay examines the project ‘revolving Hi:stories. Narrations of Performance Art in Switzerland’, a research endeavor consisting of an exhibition and a research conference in 2022. The goal of the project is to re-write the hi:story of Performance Art in Switzerland from its beginnings until today in a collective way. A crucial strategy for this oral history based research, is the participatory mapping process, where the recordings of oral history are also indexed in diagrammatic forms. First, the project “Revolving Hi:stories” is described and contextualized in the framework of recent discourses on curatorial and activist engagement by scholars like Maura Reilly or Marina Vishmidt. In a second step, the mapping and diagrammatic activities of the project based on Lepecki’s theory of choreopolitics and Elisabeth Bronfen’s concept of crossmapping are thoroughly analyzed. Finally, for the first time, a description of important groups and sites for the activist performance scene in Zurich is given, based on numerous interviews and the mapping sessions in 2021 - which the authors realized together with Chris Regn, Andrea Saemann, Clemens Fellmann and Tancredi Gusman.

Resistance to the Neo-liberal Economy and the Life of a Play: The Jana Natya Manch and Theatre Activism

For left cultural activism, ‘theatre’ forms an important ‘worksite of democracy’ which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing ‘field of forces’. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play Nahi Qubool (Unacceptable) was designed to expose neo-liberal policies undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. The play continued to be performed even after a change of government with suitable modifications for changed circumstances. This genealogy of performance demonstrates the contours of politics and activist performances in contemporary India. It reveals that theatre as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ can also perform a diagnostic role to enhance the effectiveness of political strategy.

Activist performances on edge: spatial politics after the end of public space

ABSTRACT Analyses of the shifting dynamics of public space often give way to nostalgic desires to return to former iterations imagined as universally accessible and egalitarian. Instead of lamenting the end of public space, I propose that the contradictions and impossibilities embedded within the colonial concept of publicness might be cause to embrace such an ending. I first introduce the idea of false publics by lingering in a Detroit alleyway to unveil how popular esthetics and discourses of community can obfuscate the violence of structural oppressions. Rather than use this example to argue for a return to truly public space, I instead turn to a series of activist performances to suggest that their embodied acts seek something other than recuperation. By working against prevailing norms about how to act in public, I suggest that these performances challenge the colonial formation of public space and make possible more radical spatial politics.

Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State ed. by Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emily Pine

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State ed. by Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emily Pine Eamon Maher (bio) Miriam Haughton, Mary McAuliffe and Emily Pine (eds), Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender, and the Postcolonial Carceral State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 274 pages. This is a very important addition to the ever-increasing list of academic studies dealing with the dark shadow cast by the presence of the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland and the sad legacy they left in their wake. In their introduction, the editors explain how it is incumbent on Irish society to face up to the reality of what went on behind the walls of these institutions where girls and young women were sent, sometimes for having become pregnant outside of marriage, but often for the simple reason that their parents were deemed incapable of looking after them properly. One can detect the (justifiable) anger of the contributors to this collection at the obvious collusion of Church and state in what some would describe as the unlawful incarceration of more than 10,000 girls and women between the years of 1922 and 1996. As someone who comes from Roscrea where Sean Ross, a Mother and Baby Home, was located, I am well-placed to understand society’s ability to ignore things happening under its nose. I was totally ignorant of the previous function of the abbey before I read Martin Sixsmith’s award-winning book Philomena and saw the powerful film version of the same name. For me, St Anne’s (as it was called when I was growing up) was a much-lauded school for children with disabilities: I never knew it had been a place where unmarried mothers and their babies were sent. Philomena Lee, the heroine of Sixsmith’s book, gave birth in Sean Ross to a son Anthony, who went on to become a highly regarded member of the Reagan administration in the US before his untimely death from AIDS in 1993. Mike (the name given to him by his adoptive parents) travelled to Ireland and visited Sean Ross on more than one occasion in an effort to make contact with his birth mother, but his efforts came to naught when the nuns denied they had any knowledge of Philomena’s whereabouts, whereas they did, in fact, know her address. Such subterfuge is a feature of how the Magdalen (often spelt with an ‘e’ at the end) Laundries and other such institutions operated. The editors rightly argue that the treatment of women in the Laundries was an expression of ‘social attitudes that viewed vulnerable members of [End Page 196] the population as morally suspect, a ‘problem’ which the state, church, and citizenry responded to through mass institutionalization.’ The multidisciplinary approach adopted by the contributors to this volume employs methodological and theoretical lenses ranging from psychology to history, readings of political, artistic and oral testimonies, site-specific dramatic and activist performances, and autobiographical testimonies from those who spent time in the Laundries. The findings of the McAleese report into the operation of the Laundries are described as providing hard evidence that the state had been directly involved in committing a large number of women to them, that it conducted regular inspections of the Laundries under the Factories Act, that it funded some of the Laundries’ operations, that Gardaí returned women who attempted to escape from them. As such, ‘State culpability for the laundry was clearly demonstrated.’ Responding to the McAleese Report in 2013, then Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in a Dáil address: ‘The Magdalen women might have been told that they were washing away a wrong or a sin, but we know now – and to our shame – they were only scrubbing away our nation’s shadow.’ Indeed, the tendency to refer to Laundries offering a refuge to ‘fallen women’ and the idea that the inmates were given an education and some training, are shown to have had little basis in truth. James Smith’s description of the ‘architecture of containment’ embodied in places like industrial schools and Magdalen Laundries, is quoted by many of the contributors in a collection that aspires to be...

RETHINKING VISIBILITY, PERSONALIZATION AND REPRESENTATION: DISABILITY ACTIVISM IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media enable marginalized activists to create alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse through personal storytelling, a performance that emphasizes personalization and visibility. Disabled activists, however, struggle in creating their online counter-narrative due to inability to conform with able-bodied notions of activism. These notions mark online disability activism as separated from able-bodied activism, ignoring the individual considerations of disabled activists. This paper addresses these gaps by presenting the individual decision-making process of users with concealable communicative disabilities regarding activist performance of disability in social media. The three stages of this process were raised during a thematic analysis of 31 in-depth interviews with autistics, stutterers and hard of hearing users, of whom seven also kept social media diaries. First, interviewees had different perceptions of disability activism in social media. These perceptions mirror the inseparable connection between a person’s self-perception as dis/abled, and one's perceived risk of performing a disabled identity in public, which differed between experienced activists and other interviewees. Second, the interviewees' motivations manifested their risk-benefit calculations regarding public disability exposure for the potential benefit of other disabled people, and the different forms of 'private' disability activism in social media. Third, the design of the activist performances was influenced by interviewees' constant awareness of the presence of their offline acquaintances on social media, and by seeing disability as a social, rather than political, issue. This three-staged process demonstrates personalization, visibility and representation not only as essential to social media activism, but also as conflictual for activists with concealable communicative disabilities.

‘Which part of my group do I represent?’: disability activism and social media users with concealable communicative disabilities

ABSTRACT Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms’ increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists’ performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees’ various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees’ strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism.

Register features in Kalevala-metric incantations

Genres and registers of Kalevala-metric poetry have customarily been treated as correlating concepts. The paper examines a category of Kalevala-metric Origin of Fire incantations as a text-type which includes multiple linguistic registers functioning inside the genre. These registers are reflexive formations, potentially established as social situations when addressing supernatural agents. The analysis of directive utterances in the data reveals that addressing of agents varies according to the addressee. An examination of moderative particles and justification of performer's actions results in a view of register-emblematic means of addressing different agents. Register-based approach provides a way to critically re-asses the relationship of genre and register in Kalevala-metric poetry.

Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson

Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Karin Waidley Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. By Laura Edmondson. Indiana University Press, 2018. Cloth $90.00, Paper $42.00, eBook $9.99. 308 pages. 15 illustrations. I begin this review at the book’s end. Chapter 6, “Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist,” of Laura Edmondson’s Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire provoked a disquieting blue streak of recognition. I too have felt the urge to rush headlong into a situation in East Africa where I believe I know the answer to “what can I do?” But Edmonson warns readers that there are no simple questions in regions that have “a dense regional history of colonial and post-colonial violence” (5). Her book is a sweeping “sideways glance” (20) at the voracious appetites for consuming representations of trauma through performative means. Thus, her final chapter’s call-out is an unsettling one: take heed of your role on the “trauma stage” (3). Better to practice a “radical passivity,” to dwell in the discomfort of mere presence and to resist impulses of “headlong (Western) activist manifest destiny” (279). In a time when many can relate to the debilitating fatigue of inaction, this is the book’s most applicable and timely lesson. Performing Trauma in Central Africa surveys an increasing tendency toward cliched representations of mass trauma and its effects on the people of Sub-Saharan Africa. Edmonson measures ways in which the powers of empire collate complex horrors into a banal predictability of content and approach to performance in Central Africa. Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) share externally-mapped and fraught boundaries and people whose histories are deeply entrenched and inextricably intertwined. Edmondson interrogates how the “white savior industrial complex” is fast at creative work in Uganda, how culpable governments brandishing “genocide credits” (111) in Rwanda keep the 1994 travesty well within the performance frame, and how well-intentioned NGO endeavors in the DRC, some championed by well-known playwrights Eve Ensler and Lynn Nottage, shape testimony from tactically-resistant survivors of the region’s violence into victim myopia. Trauma-laden dramaturgy is performed by insiders and outsiders, not only for emotional catharsis but for financial gain. Without sentimentality, Edmondson exposes how, when resources are limited and playing fields far from level, stakeholders get mired in an “epistemic murk” or “‘the unstable interplay of truth and illusion’ that characterizes cultures of terror” (26). The Introduction combines humanitarianism, sovereignty, and empire with an “aesthetics of murk” (26) to explore taut relationships and the means through which trauma and performance are mostly marketed and sometimes resisted. Edmondson conducted two decades of extensive fieldwork, resulting in a deep perspective on the profiteering of hardship in an area where access to theatre scholarship is scant. The author foregrounds her own outsider/insider position as suspect, one that [End Page 219] readers should be wary of when reading her analyses of the “murky” performances that follow. The author’s transparency calls attention to the burden of empire she both carries and casts off whenever possible. From this position, Edmondson tasks readers: if “we” will not choose to “stay home” (271) then be two things at once: both radical and passive. She demonstrates this necessary paradox by virtue of the (failed) activist performance models set out incisively in each of her following chapters. In chapter 1, “Competitive Memory in the Great Lakes,” Edmondson deftly explicates the interwoven pasts of the three nation-states that figure in later chapters. These are the formal landscapes of performative trauma displayed through music, dance, and drama (MDD) and on the informal “stages” of museums, memorials, and NGO-sponsored sites. More historiographic than performance analysis, this chapter introduces readers to the interconnectedness of the Lake Victoria region in a jaw-dropping portrayal of colonial pasts with a dizzying cast of characters. She demonstrates how histories are forcibly flattened into three singular narratives, one per country (genocide in Rwanda, child abductions in Uganda, and weaponized rape in DRC), with “a curious predictability” that “insistently cuts across representations of violence” (5). But like the “shadows of empire,” simplified narratives...

Representing the Unrepresentable in South Korean Activist Performances

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized in the southern region of South Korea: 304 passengers died, including 250 high school students. Despite an international outcry, there has not yet been a comprehensive investigation into what caused the Sewol to sink and why the passengers were not rescued promptly. This article discusses how performance can represent something that defies explanation because we do not know how or why it happened. Yellow Ribbon’s Talent Show, Namsan Arts Centre’s From Pluto, and Camino de Ansan performed the role of the students who died. Taking these three case studies, this article analyzes the ways in which they strive to represent the unrepresentable as they attempt to document the sinking and achieve justice, while memorializing the victims and arguing for the necessity of a more safety-conscious society. Areum Jeong is Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Jeong’s research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean-American film, literature, theatre, and performance. Her current book project explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korean and diasporic communities.

Rewriting ‘herstory’: Sasha Velour’s drag as art and activism

ABSTRACT Following its move to VH1 in 2017, Season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) was positioned to capture a larger audience than ever before, boasting the strongest field of competitors in its ‘herstory’. This article maps the career trajectory of Season 9 winner Sasha Velour to determine how she distinguishes herself from previous champions. While winners of RPDR are expected to possess the virtues of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, Velour’s articulation of fame post RPDR has been informed by charisma and uniqueness, coupled with a consistent performance of an ‘authentic’ persona. Since winning Season 9, Velour has been an outspoken advocate for the transgender community and the need to diversify drag, in addition to drawing attention from the mainstream fashion industry for her art and style. Drawing inspiration from RPDR’s virtues, I argue that the performance of charisma and uniqueness are essential to interpreting the success of the drag celebrity persona as part of the ‘fame cycle’ beyond RPDR. Velour’s star image is distinctive for centring art and activist performance as vital to her public persona across transmedia platforms, allowing for the promotion of positive change for the LGBTQIA community worldwide.

Understanding Musical Predictions With an Embodied Interface for Musical Machine Learning.

Machine-learning models of music often exist outside the worlds of musical performance practice and abstracted from the physical gestures of musicians. In this work, we consider how a recurrent neural network (RNN) model of simple music gestures may be integrated into a physical instrument so that predictions are sonically and physically entwined with the performer's actions. We introduce EMPI, an embodied musical prediction interface that simplifies musical interaction and prediction to just one dimension of continuous input and output. The predictive model is a mixture density RNN trained to estimate the performer's next physical input action and the time at which this will occur. Predictions are represented sonically through synthesized audio, and physically with a motorized output indicator. We use EMPI to investigate how performers understand and exploit different predictive models to make music through a controlled study of performances with different models and levels of physical feedback. We show that while performers often favor a model trained on human-sourced data, they find different musical affordances in models trained on synthetic, and even random, data. Physical representation of predictions seemed to affect the length of performances. This work contributes new understandings of how musicians use generative ML models in real-time performance backed up by experimental evidence. We argue that a constrained musical interface can expose the affordances of embodied predictive interactions.

Amateur Performance and the Labour of Love or cultural reproduction ‘after’ the collapse of capitalism

The term ‘amateur’ is bound up with love. Performers, cultural workers and other community members devote time out of ‘love’ to engage in and with creative embodied pursuits. ‘Love’, however, responds to changing social orders and modes of sociality. It plays a seminal role in cultural reproduction. Thinking through the performances of a social circus group as they collapse a ‘capitalist pyramid’, and the calls of a performance artist to create a collective ‘manifesto of love’ during an event memorializing a six-month-long student strike and the activist performances that had successfully challenged a 75 per cent tuition hike, this piece asks: What is the role of love in twenty-first-century amateur performance? Love is here explored as a fusional force of devotion and transformation, as well as a trap through which institutions draw on un- or underpaid labour to promote social cohesion. Amateur performance, it suggests, highlights what is not being performed within professional contexts, as well as who has the time and ability to perform without pay, and who cannot afford not to perform.

Ontology of Card Sleights

We present a machine-readable movement writing for sleightof-hand moves with cards - a "Labanotation of card magic." This scheme of movement writing contains 440 categories of motion, and appears to taxonomize all card sleights that have appeared in over 1500 publications. The movement writing is axiomatized in SROIQ(D) Description Logic, and collected formally as an Ontology of Card Sleights, a computational ontology that extends the Basic Formal Ontology and the Information Artifact Ontology. The Ontology of Card Sleights is implemented in OWL DL, a Description Logic fragment of the Web Ontology Language. While ontologies have historically been used to classify at a less granular level, the algorithmic nature of card tricks allows us to transcribe a performer's actions step by step. We conclude by discussing design criteria we have used to ensure the ontology can be accessed and modified with a simple click-and-drag interface. This may allow database searches and performance transcriptions by users with card magic knowledge, but no ontology background.

Activist performance and performative activism towards intersectional gender and sexual justice in contemporary South Africa

Democratic South Africa post-1994 boasts an impressive constitutional and legal commitment to human rights, including the enshrinement of sexual and gender rights. Notwithstanding, a growing body of work documents continued widespread homophobia, heterosexism and violence against gender and sexual non-conforming people that intersect with other inequalities. However, there is also a rich terrain of resistance to intersectional gender and sexual injustices evidenced by proliferating decolonial, feminist and queer activism and art. Located in the South African post-apartheid and postcolonial context, this article draws on the last few years of decolonial, feminist and queer engagements, focusing in on two current examples of activist performance and performative activism. The article explores the socio-political possibilities of interventions which transgress, disturb, disrupt and queer contemporary rigid and re/calcifying gender and sexual normativities for the larger decolonial, feminist and queer sexual and gender rights and justice project, as well as for critical scholarship directed at such goals.