Connor Milliken
Published: 21 January 2019
Queer History-Making in Performance: Interrogating Scotland’s Narrative of Liberalisation.
University of Glasgow
Queer History-Making in Performance: Interrogating Scotland’s Narrative of Liberalisation.
Scotland has seen rapid socio-political progress regarding the lives of LGBTQ peoples. This narrative of progress contains within it LGBTQ theatre practitioners who used autobiography to interrogate the overarching narrative being written in Scotland. This project will establish an expanded history of LGBTQ theatre in Scotland and argue that it has predominantly told the stories of white, gay men and women. I will plug these gaps by facilitating workshops with minoritized individuals within this community to create performances using their own biographies.
This project draws on the work of queer theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz to challenge and extend knowledge of the role which autobiographical performance plays in the construction of public LGBTQ histories and, more sharply, social narratives of progress. Drawing on Muñoz’s account of disidentification as an alternative to both rebellion and assimilation, I will consider how the potential of autobiographical performance to animate the lives and histories of minority communities (as elaborated by Deirdre Heddon, Kristin Langellier and other scholars) has informed and been informed by - the progress of formal, legal equality.”
First published: 21 January 2019