Queer Futures

Queer Futures is a Working Group contained within IFTR which has met since 2010, welcoming all researchers at any stage of their career with an interest in queer performance, queer research, queer theory, queer politics, queer practice, queer histories and more.

KEYWORDS

interdisciplinary
intergenerational
gender & sexuality
critical theory
decolonial & anti-colonial

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the convenors through this email: iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com

CFP for IFTR 2025

IFTR 2025: University of Cologne, Germany. 9-13 June 2025.
Performing Carnival!
Ekstasis | Subversion | Metamorphosis

Submission of proposals: by 15 January 2025
Bursary applications: by 22 November 2024 (https://iftr.org/conference/bursaries)

Queer Futures Working Group invites contributions from artists and academics at all stages of their careers. You can find guidance on how to apply to join us at IFTR25 below, or email us on iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com.

We call for proposals that enact what Queers in Palestine identify as an ongoing, subversive ‘confrontation with the forces that seek to erase us on the path towards life-affirming and systemic transformation’ while also developing the strategies ‘to radically imagine and build a different future from the present.’

Holding close the queer protest rallying cry ‘no Pride for some us without liberation for all of us,’ Queer Futures proposes a space for decolonial critique that attends to how Pride and other associated queer-focused festivities can function as an extension of necropolitics when aligned with corporations, and other colonial structures, even as we re-iterate the political potential of queer collectivity—often hardwon, at risk of policing, violence and destruction. Recalling Queers in Palestine’s request for us to ‘channel our hope as a collective force of resistance to the very foundation of these unjust systems, in Palestine and everywhere’, we must act on Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira’s observation that ‘decolonial thinking must make queerness more attentive to the existence of a matrix of power that operates by naturalised racial and gender hierarchies; that allows for the reproduction of territorial and epistemological domination; and that obliterates experiences, forms of knowledge, and forms of life’ (Gomes Pereira, 2019, 421).

In today’s political climate, we propose the need to problematise carnivals and their colonialist legacies and complicities with anti-blackness, racism, pinkwashing, and settler colonial logic. Turning to the postcolony, we find nation-states like the Philippines, where pageantries such as the Manila Carnival Queen—introduced by the U.S. colonial state in 1908—were colonial imports intended to shape postcolonial bodies in the image of whiteness (Clutario, 2023), or Colombia, where carnivals are revered as “ethno-enterprises,” reflecting the implications of a globalising migration of anti-blackness (Valle, 2018). More glaringly, within our movements, Pride has emerged as our ultimate carnival, an exemplar of increasing commercialisation and weaponisation for nationalist agendas, often used to justify racism, anti-Blackness, and even genocide. As Jasbir Puar (2007) notably critiques, for instance, the controversial 2006 WorldPride held in Jerusalem highlighted pinkwashing, framing Israel as liberal while erasing its colonial violence, genocide, and folding of Palestinian queers out of life. Over in the havens of gay tourism within Asia, like Taiwan and Thailand, corporations and governments use LGBTQ+ rights and Pride events to appear progressive while diverting attention from ongoing issues of inequality, political oppression, and exploitation within the broader society.

While Pride and Christopher Street Day marches, celebrations, parades and events are now globally widespread, they remain contested sites of conflict between conflicting notions of queer and LGBTQIA+ identities where various modes of inclusion and exclusion, celebration and protest, caught between homonationalism and liberation. Pride events are often subject to various state or factional oppressions globally. In Ghana, Pride month events were pushed ‘under the radar’ as parliamentarians approved the cruel and inhumane Human Sexual Values and Family Values Bill in February 2024, and safety concerns meant a public parade was not possible. In Bautzen, Germany, the second-ever Christopher Street Day march of around 1000 people in August 2024 was met by 700 neo-Nazis holding a ‘counter-demo’, including the burning of rainbow flags. The presence of fascist-oriented transphobia at the highly commercialised London Pride has led to alternative community-led events such as London Trans+ Pride being established. At the same time, there has been a rise in boycotts and protests of Pride events and their sponsors, organised or inspired by the coalitional ‘No Pride in Genocide’ campaign. At Pride events in public spaces, declarations of solidarity between queer liberation and Palestinian liberation movements have a long history. This solidarity erupted into stark focus at Berlin's Internationalist Queer Pride and Dyke Marches in July 2024, where peaceful demonstrations were met with incidents of police violence.

Last year's iteration of IFTR asked us to think about tragedy: a brutal mixture of loss, ecstasy, violence, transformation, and recognition—a movement deeper into knowing and the previously incomprehensible. It has been over a year since the Israeli war machine roared into a new phase of control, destruction and terror—enacting a series of overlapping and expanding military conflicts without any end in sight. Over the past thirteen months, these moments of recognition have cumulated unbearably in a series of ongoing reckonings as we witness an unfolding genocide, which we should not turn away from. Carrying Isabella Hammad’s definition of ancient Greek tragedy as containing ‘the ritual, the carnivalesque, the wild, the emotional within a structure that was coordinated by the powers that be as a way to purge feelings from the population’, we want to interrogate what structures are being coordinated by powers that be as a way to endure, deny, and further facilitate the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and examine our complicities and resistances as queers, academics and artists entangled in these systems of power.

Areas for consideration or exploration around the above call for proposals might include, but are not limited to:

The role of theatre, performance, festivals and carnivals in pinkwashing
Research approaches rooted in decolonial queer practices and thought
Queer temporalities in carnivals
Carnivalesque scenographies and documentations of media images of queerness
The carnivalesque in decolonial/anti-colonial ‘queer’ performance practices
Pride parades historically or presently and their relationships with homonationalism, pinkwashing, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and liberation in various social, cultural and national contexts
Homonormative and homonationalist politics in theatre and performance
Protests as sites of resistance against pinkwashing
Queer performance as entangled with or in resistance to spatial practices of expansion and material programmes of capture, extraction, dispossession
Queer youth voice in protest and resistance
Queer decolonial activism as/and community-building
Queer spectacles and surveillance
Queer affect and necropolitics
Censorship of works and artists which have expressed pro-Palestinian solidarity

We welcome all researchers at any stage of their career to join Queer Futures, including postgraduate and early career researchers. Submissions on any topics relevant to the working group will be considered.

Guidance on Conference and how to attend:

The International Federation of Theatre Research’s (IFTR) annual conference is a global meeting to facilitate communication and exchange between theatre and performance research scholars. Queer Futures is a Working Group contained within IFTR which has met since 2010, welcoming all researchers at any stage of their career with an interest in queer performance, queer research, queer theory, queer politics, queer practice, queer histories and more.

The University of Cologne, Germany, will host the 2025 IFTR conference. IFTR currently only supports in-person attendance, but please get in touch with us directly (iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com) if there are access reasons that prevent you from attending in person. You have to be a member of IFTR to submit a proposal; membership costs are detailed here. There will be an additional conference fee, travel and accommodation costs, which you will need to cover to attend (most attendees are supported by their institutions or other scholarships and bursaries available in their countries/localities). IFTR bursaries are available here (note: the IFTR bursary deadline is 22 November, 2024). If you are applying for a bursary, please first fill out the form on the IFTR website, then send Queer Futures a copy of your proposal separately and indicate you have applied for the bursary.

Our hosts have assured us that spaces will be wheelchair accessible throughout campus. If you require access adjustments to participate fully in the Working Group, please contact us (iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com), and we will do our best to meet these requirements.

How to apply:

We invite diverse modes of presenting and sharing research, including, but not limited to, provocations, practice demonstrations, performance presentations, curated panels, long tables, roundtables, and informal and formal papers.

Papers and presentations can be 15 minutes (full-length) or 5 minutes (test-length). Please consider what form is best for your ideas, as shorter papers allow more ideas to circulate in the room and enrich the quality of discussion. For the purposes of accessing research funding, all papers are invited equally.

Please clearly indicate your preferred format in your proposal, with a specific breakdown of any technical requirements. We will do our best to accommodate all requests, but please be aware that we are working with finite resources and may need to suggest alternative formats. Alongside traditional written abstracts, we welcome proposals in alternative forms to support your access preference and pleasure, e.g. voice notes or videos up to 1.5 minutes in length. We will prioritise proposals that address the areas mentioned in this call for papers.

To send a proposal please include:

The title of your paper or contribution
Approx 300-500 words that outline your ideas
Info on format of presentation and any technical requirements
A short bio

All abstracts should be submitted to Cambridge Core. Please note that you will have to be a member of the IFTR to submit an abstract. To join the IFTR or renew your membership, please visit the Cambridge Core membership page. Please also send your proposal via email to: iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com

Submission by: 15 January 2025 (note: there is no planned extension to the CfP this year, so please ensure you have sent your proposal by this date).

While the annual IFTR conference is focused on in-person attendance, the Queer Futures working group will propose interim online events to connect researchers digitally, prioritising those who are not able to attend the conference. If you would like to be added to our mailing list please email us: iftrqueerfutures@gmail.com

Any other questions, please email us and we’ll do our best,

In solidarity,

Queer Futures co-convenors

Works Cited

Clutario, Genevieve. Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2023
Gomes Pereira, Pedro Paulo. “Reflecting on Decolonial Queer”. GLQ: Journal of GLBTQ Studies 25, no. 3 (2019): 403-429. doi: 10.1215/10642684-7551112
Hammad, Isabella Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, London: Vintage Publishing, Penguin Random House, 2024
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007
Valle, Melissa M. “Burlesquing Blackness: Racial Significations in Carnivals and the Carnivalesque on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast”. Public Culture 31, no. 1 (2018): 5-20. Doi: 10.1215/08992363-7181814

Convenors

Phoebe Patey-Ferguson
Marcus Bell
Ella McCarthy
Ian Rafael Ramirez

Mission Statement

Since its inception in 2010, the working group has considered the queer subjects, issues, theories and methods that our international network of researchers and practicioners are currently engaging with. We're here for the terribly beautiful, the radical, and the urgent. The core mission of Queer Futures is as follows:

To foster an environment imbued with queer joy and hope where all members feel supported
To develop an international dialogue on topics that motivate its members which include, but are not limited to, queer dramaturgy, affect, history and historiography, temporality, representation, community, transnationality, performance research, globalisation, politics, and the intersections of queer thinking with critical race theory, decoloniality, anti-coloniality, posthumanism, and more
To build capacities for new scholars (postgraduate and early career members) to be involved in presenting, convening and shaping the working group's direction.
To continue the party even beyond the conferences through sustaining dialogues, keeping in touch, and facilitating spaces for queer gathering

Current Projects

Queer Performance: International Practices, Histories and Approaches

Series Editors:

Alyson Campbell, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Farrier, Rose Bruford College, UK
Nando Messias, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK

We are pleased to announce a call for contributions to a new book series at Bloomsbury Publishing. Queer Performance explores what queer performance is and what it has been; it re-imagines what queer performance can do and critically engages with what its futures might hold. Considering work on a diverse set of stages – from nightclubs to national stages, art spaces to the street – the series actively seeks to open space for voices that have had limited, if any, space before. The series takes a broad view of the ways that queer narratives, bodies, identities and performance-making strategies approach the multiple expressions of queerness in performance.

We would like to invite proposals for single-authored, co-authored and edited scholarly volumes that may connect with, but are not limited to, the following themes and areas (in no particular order):

queer archives and archiving
queer work in/with decolonial critique
queer intersections with race, ethnicity, nation, migration and diaspora
First Nations queer work
queer live art
drag in all its diversity and international locations
queer’s intersections with disabilities
queer takes on class and poverty in performance-making
trans performance
performance work created by trans writers
performance work centring trans performers, stories and experiences
performance work directed by trans directors, makers, practitioners
transness as creative methodology
national/international perspectives on queer performance cultures
queer theatre-making: playwriting, directing, dramaturgy
queer nightlife performance and dance cultures
queer plays on mainstages
musicality and queerness
queer performance histories and historiographies
fatness and queerness
queer sound
queerness and affect
queer design
queer making processes
queer hauntings and hauntologies
HIV and AIDS in performance
contagion and viral dramaturgies

To discuss or submit a proposal for the series, contact: alyson.campbell@unimelb.edu.au; stephen.farrier@bruford.ac.uk; nando.messias@cssd.ac.uk

Publications

2024. Joe Parslow. Their Majesty: Drag Performance and Queer Communities in London, Abingdon: Routledge
2024. Matthew Bapty. ‘Waltzing Around the Veranda: Reclaiming the Dandy in Australian Bush Drama’, in Australasian Drama Studies Journal, 84: 310-341.
2024. Ian Rafael Ramirez. ‘Provincial Drag in the Philippine Tropics: Towards a Decolonial Queer Tropical Aesthetics”, in eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 23(2): 101-123.
2024. Emma Welton. ‘Let it Burn: Smell, Participation, and Solidarity in Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz’, in Contemporary Theatre Review, 34 (2): 117-132.
2023. Joe Parslow. ‘Kings, Queens, Monsters and Things: Digital Drag Performance and Queer Moves in Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, in Contemporary Theatre Review (Special Issue: What’s Queer About Queer Performance Now), 33(1-2): 128-48
2020. Emma Welton. ‘Welcome to The Jungle: Performing Borders and Belonging in Contemporary British Migration Theatre’, in Theatre Research International, 45 (3): 230-244.

Leadership History

Founders: Alyson Campbell and Fintan Walsh
2014 – 2018: Sarah Mullan and Lazlo Pearlman
2019 – 2022: Ankush Gupta, Fatima A. Maan, and Joe Parslow
2022 – 2024: Rodrigo Canete, Jeremy Neideck, and Phoebe Patey-Ferguson