‘There’s Always A Plague, There’s Always a Fire’: Contemporary Queer-Feminist Theatre

This seminar introduces students to the creative potential to be found on the contemporary queer-feminist stage. Theatre is, arguably, the most immediate of art forms and as such can move, defamiliarize and surprise readers and audiences in a visceral manner. Throughout history, theatre and performance have rebelled against and critiqued unjust societal conditions, power hierarchies or normative gender roles. To this end, students will first be introduced to works by performance and queer theory scholars such as Jill Dolan, Jen Harvie and Sam McBean.

We then want to focus specifically on the portrayal and experience of queer and female* lives in recent years and how selected theatre plays put experiences of marginalization, strength and revolt centre-stage. Throughout the semester, we will read and discuss five plays together which represent different approaches to these topics shaped by various positionalities and viewpoints. For instance, Jordan Tannahill’s Botticelli in the Fire (2019), with its pleasure-loving protagonist Sandro Botticelli who meets the scorn of a powerful Catholic Friar, presents a queering of Renaissance Italy and a commentary on what happens when dissent reigns. Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan (2022) also works with historical material and presents a queer retelling of Joan of Arc’s fate, reimagining them as a non-binary heroine. The playwright Alice Birch, inspired among other things by Valerie Solanas’ 1967 feminist SCUM Manifesto in her play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (2014) works with thirteen vignettes portraying topics such as access to education for women, misogyny, sexual assault and feminist utopias. In Mojisola Adebayo’s Stars (2023), audiences are taken on an Afro-Futurist journey and invited to question the normative depiction of (female) sexuality and age. The Pakistani-British writer Iman Qureshi, then, has stated that she wants to create “a lesbian mecca” and, taking up theatrical devices such as the Choir known from Ancient Greek theatre, in her play The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs not only takes up topics of friendship but also transphobia within the lesbian community.

All in all, the selected plays will provide students with a sense for how recent British and Canadian plays partake in societal discourses around LGBTQ* and women’s rights and why it is especially necessary now to counter and revolt against dissent, hatred and the marginalization of minorities.