Performing Queer + Trans Activism

Course Description: No prior performance experience required. Performance is defined broadly to include staged theater, installation, film, digital media, activism, everyday life, and more. This course looks at historic and emerging models of activism by queer and trans communities. What makes this activism queer or trans? Is it determined by who enacts it or is there something particularly queer or trans about the methods used? Throughout the course, we will consider how these activist models have adopted performance tactics to achieve maximum impact as well as how performance itself has represented and accompanied the development of these models affecting how queer and trans communities think of and further devise their activism. This course is also concerned with how contemporary performances, films, novels, and more have reflected on these activist histories and are indeed forms of activism themselves, including portrayals of AIDS activism, the Stonewall Riots, protests of the prison industrial complex and much more. Through performance we will ask: what are the stories we tell ourselves about our past and how do they inform what we imagine and fight for in the future? Through an exploration of a history of activist tactics and performance representations, students will choose between crafting a performance that might be used toward activist ends or an activist intervention that draws on performance aesthetics.