QPJ: A Journal of Queer Performance Home Page
QPJ provides an international forum for the critical examination of queer performance in its most expansive forms. As a fully independent open access journal, QPJ is committed to research that interrogates queerness in performance and that considers what performance opens, destabilises and reconfigures in queerness. Following Alyson Campbell, Steve Farrier and Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy, we ask: what’s queer about queer performance now?
QPJ publishes scholarship on all aspects of queer performance and live art, including but not limited to performance art, dance, theatre, drag, dramaturgy, cabaret, writing, poetry, sound, music, video, moving image, digital arts and the various (counter) cultural and (anti) institutional contexts in which these practices exist. We are interested in how the social, material, ethical and historical are performed and queer modes of analysis that explore how human and other-than-human structures, events and processes become sites of contestation. Embracing affect, QPJ encourages interdisciplinarity and hopes to catch work that falls between the cracks of pre-existing disciplines.
QPJ maintains (in the words of Jack Smith) a ‘hatred of capitalism’, is unashamed of its liberationist positioning and desire for radicalism, while attending to the many vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, hypocrises, limitations and fractures of queer lives, labour and art. We echo Kay Gabriel and Andrea Abi-Karam’s call, from the title of their earth-shaking anthology of radical trans poetics, as we too ‘want it all’: a free Palestine, abolition, open borders, ecological justice, the self-determination of people against capital and colonial relations, bread, roses, and hormones. As such, QJP strives to refute monolithic and assimilationist conceptions of queerness – embracing plurality and complexity – and to wear holes in homonationalism, by frequently advocating for the debased, filthy, rotten and perverse.