Nicht aus der Schweiz? Besuchen Sie lehmanns.de
Performing the Queer Past - Fintan Walsh

Performing the Queer Past

Public Possessions

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
244 Seiten
2025
Methuen Drama (Verlag)
978-1-350-29800-2 (ISBN)
CHF 49,95 inkl. MwSt
  • Noch nicht erschienen (ca. März 2025)
  • Versandkostenfrei
  • Auch auf Rechnung
  • Artikel merken
'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.

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.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Performing Queer Possession
1. Channelling Ghosts: the Haunted Present
2. Muscle Memories: Exe(o)rcising History
3. Re-enacting Violence: Sharing Responsibility
4. Arresting Objects: Transforming Matters
5. Wilde Spirits: Occupation and Commemoration
6. Grief’s Ricochet: Intermedial Returns
7. Epilogue: Shorelines of the Dispossessed

Notes
References
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag 20.3.2025
Reihe/Serie Methuen Drama Agitations: Text, Politics and Performances
Mitarbeit Herausgeber (Serie): Anja Hartl, William C. Boles
Zusatzinfo 17 bw illus
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt Literatur Lyrik / Dramatik Dramatik / Theater
Kunst / Musik / Theater Theater / Ballett
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie Gender Studies
ISBN-10 1-350-29800-X / 135029800X
ISBN-13 978-1-350-29800-2 / 9781350298002
Zustand Neuware
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
Eine Liebeserklärung

von Ferdinand von Schirach

Buch | Hardcover (2023)
Luchterhand (Verlag)
CHF 29,90
Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust

von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Erich Trunz

Buch | Hardcover (2021)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 15,90
Kleist, Heinrich von – Deutsch-Lektüre, Deutsche Klassiker der …

von Heinrich von Kleist; Bernd Hamacher

Buch | Softcover (2024)
Reclam, Philipp (Verlag)
CHF 11,90