Abstract

Queer performance has historically illuminated an imbalance of care for minoritarian concerns and fostered community connections for collective survival and resistance.¹ This article interweaves theorisations by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and collaborators in the book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice² and draws upon interviews with key queer cultural producers, practitioners, scholars, and artists currently working in the UK to identify and theorise contemporary ethics and practices of care in their work. It reveals how queer performance practice attempts to address issues of ethnicity, race, class, disability, gender, and gender identity, tokenism and racial representation, access, class, (dis)ability, and trans-inclusivity in generative ways.³ Considering the urgent need for material reconfigurations and diversification of the UK arts sector – both in response to and preceding the global COVID-19 pandemic – I argue that an ethics of care and orientation toward action can address ongoing issues around who and what is ‘made to matter’ in queer arts production. Contemporary queer performance praxis in the UK reaches further toward the margins to find new solutions to embed radical care in production practices. As philosopher Rosi Braidotti suggests, such work ‘is enhanced by the rejection of self-centred individualism … [producing] a new way of combining self-interests with the well-being of an enlarged community’.⁴ Through foregrounding collectivity, community, care, and social justice the queer performance sector is well positioned to be at the forefront of wider cultural production trends, creating, and amplifying change throughout the sector and beyond.

摘要

酷儿表演在历史上揭示了对少数群体关注的不平衡，并促进了集体生存和抵抗的社区联系。¹本文将 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 及其合作者在《护理工作：梦想残疾正义^2》一书中的理论交织在一起，并借鉴了对目前在英国工作的主要酷儿文化生产者、从业者、学者和艺术家的采访，以识别和理论化当代伦理以及工作中的护理实践。它揭示了酷儿表演实践如何试图以生成的方式解决民族、种族、阶级、残疾、性别和性别认同、象征主义和种族代表性、准入、阶级、（不）能力和跨包容性等问题。³考虑到英国艺术部门迫切需要物质重组和多样化——无论是为了应对全球 COVID-19 大流行还是在全球大流行之前——我认为，关怀伦理和行动导向可以解决围绕谁和什么“创作”的持续问题在酷儿艺术创作中发挥重要作用。英国当代酷儿表演实践进一步走向边缘，寻找新的解决方案，将激进的关怀融入到生产实践中。正如哲学家罗西·布拉多蒂（Rosi Braidotti）所说，此类工作“通过拒绝以自我为中心的个人主义而得到加强……[产生]一种将自身利益与扩大的社区福祉结合起来的新方式”。⁴通过突出集体、社区、关怀和社会正义，酷儿表演行业处于更广泛的文化生产趋势的最前沿，在整个行业内外创造和扩大变革。