Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions

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Fintan Walsh (Author, Birkbeck, University of London, UK) Anja Hartl (University of Innsbruck, Austria)

Performing the Queer Past

Public Possessions

Fintan Walsh (Author, Birkbeck, University of London, UK), Anja Hartl (University of Innsbruck, Austria), William C. Boles (Rollins College, USA)

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English

Methuen Drama
20 March 2025

Theatre Studies; 21st century history: from c 2000 -; Social & cultural history; Gay & Lesbian studies

Series: Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances

'Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.'

anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness

‘This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resistance, as well as holding the potential for performers and audiences to work through painfully felt yet difficult to articulate experiences towards feelings of hope. Replete with rigorous, generous and creative readings, it is also a meditation on Walsh’s own emotional engagement with queer theatre and performance, and how our cultural attachments can sustain, enliven and contain us.’

Noreen Giffney, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis

Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past? What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history? How might the experience of theatre and performance relieve the present of its most arduous burdens?

Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries hailed as confirming the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people were over, this book turns our attention to artists fixed on history’s enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples including theatre, performance, installation and digital practices, Fintan Walsh explores how this work reckons with complex cultural and personal histories. Among the issues confronted are the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial and sexual objectification, the AIDS crisis and Covid-19, alongside more local and individual experiences of violence, trauma and grief.

Walsh traces how the queer past is summoned and interrogated via what he elaborates as the aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injury, injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt and disturb the present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to respond to history’s unresolved hurt.

By: Fintan Walsh (Author Birkbeck University of London UK)
Series edited by: Anja Hartl (University of Innsbruck Austria), William C. Boles (Rollins College, USA)
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781350298002
ISBN 10: 135029800X
Series: Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances
Pages: 244
Publication Date: 20 March 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.

Reviews for Performing the Queer Past: Public Possessions

Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. In moving with, and through, the rip currents of death, love and queer inheritances, Walsh asks us to reimagine how and why we endure all that was and is yet to come. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest. * anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness * This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resistance, as well as holding the potential for performers and audiences to work through painfully felt yet difficult to articulate experiences towards feelings of hope. Replete with rigorous, generous and creative readings, it is also a meditation on Walsh’s own emotional engagement with queer theatre and performance, and how our cultural attachments can sustain, enliven and contain us. * Noreen Giffney, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis *