Queer Performance in the Post-Millennial Scramble

The subject of this dissertation is contemporary queer feminist performance in Canada. My practice-informed research takes a unique approach to studying performance through what I call the queer performance scramblea term that draws on the multiple meanings of scramble to understand the aesthetics of queer performance and its challenges to stable conceptions of both identity and temporality. I investigate works that are happening now and that scramble the sticky elements of their own cultural constructions and queer temporalities. The temporal turn in queer theory supports my engagement with the effects of temporality, performativity, and history on queer performance, and, conversely, the effects of queer performance on time. I am equally interested in the formal and material dimensions of the work I study. I look to the content, style, material conditions, and social scenes of queer feminist performance from the perspective of both an academic and an artist to make accessible work that is often marginalized within Canadian cultural production ecology. Chapter 1 investigates queer feminist hauntings with an analysis of Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logues Killjoys Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. Chapter 2 argues that cabaret is the primary site for queer feminist performance in Canada, and when framed as a methodological problem/solution matrix, both the celebratory and limiting potential of the form can be explored. In chapter 3 I analyze performances by Jess Dobkin, Dayna McLeod, and Shaista Latif to excavate forms of durationality that expose the complex interplay of life and art. And, in chapter 4, I turn to practice-based research methodology to explore the concept of queer resonance in a trans feminist performance called trace. This research will give rise to new conversations about the Canadian performance ecology and its performance archive. It will enrich theoretical considerations of queer as always already transtemporal and intractable and make an intervention into the ideological space between queer and feminist performance studies. Thinking within the rubric of the queer performance scramble means thinking differently about performance and timewhile always keeping the art at the very centre of the investigation and always returning to it for guidance.