The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide students with an overview of key developments in queer and trans feminist theories and their significance to the field of contemporary performance studies. It presents new insights highlighting the ways in which rigid or punishing notions of gender, sexuality and race continue to flourish in systems of knowledge, faith and power which are relevant to a new generation of queer and trans feminist performers today.
The guiding question for the Handbook is: How do queer and trans feminist theories enhance our understanding of developments in feminist performance today, and will this discussion give rise to new ways of theorizing contemporary performance? As such, the volume will survey a new generation of performers and theorists, as well as senior scholars, who engage and redefine the limits of performance. The chapters will demonstrate how intersectional, queer and trans feminist theoretical tools support new analyses of performance with a global focus. The primary audience will be students of theatre/ performance studies as well as queer /gender studies. The volume’s contents suggest close links between the formation of queer feminist identities alongside recent key political developments with transnational resonances. Furthermore, the emergence of new queer and trans feminist epistemologies prompts a reorientation regarding performance and identities in a 21st-century context.

Sandra D’Urso (she/her) is an Australia-based performance and theatre studies researcher and critic, who has published on feminist performance art and performance art under legal states of exception. She has also published work on Australian theatrical modernism and contemporary Australian poetry. Her co-authored monograph with Denise Varney, Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White: Governing Culture was published in 2018.
Tiina Rosenberg (she/her) is Professor of Performance Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, and has previously been Professor of Gender Studies at Stockholm University and at Lund University, Sweden. Rosenberg has written extensively on performing arts, feminism, and queer theory. Her most recent books include Don’t Be Quiet, Start a Riot. Essays on Feminism and Performance (2016), Mästerregissören: När Ludvig Josephson tog Europa till Sverige (The Master Director: Bringing Europe to Sweden, 2017), and HBTQ Spelar Roll - Mellan Garderob Och Kanon (LGBTQ Plays a Role - Between the Canon and the Closet, 2018).
Anna Renée Winget (they/them) is currently a guest lecturer at Stockholm University, Sweden, and a mental health project manager at RFSL, Sweden’s national organization for LGBTQI rights. They hold a doctorate in drama and theatre from the Universities of California at Irvine (UCI), USA, and at San Diego (UCSD), USA, where they completed their dissertation, Performing Possibilities: Trans-Healing in Activist Performance. They received their MFA in Playwriting from Boston University, USA. Their newest play, Grand Canyon Pussy, presented by Sorority Productions, was performed in Los Angeles in 2018.