Guest Lecture: Doing Theater in a Queer Way: The Queering Potential of Affect in Contemporary Performance

with Alyson Campbell

In this paper Alyson Campbell is arguing for a practitioner approach to considerations of shaping affect in performance-making to queer (political) ends. The paper sets out Campbells central methodology of reading aesthetic ‘affective specificity’ (Gilbert) alongside lived/cultural ‘affective particularity’ (Muñoz) – queerness, understood as intersectional – to see how it might work to create affective communities. How, as queer makers, might we take an affective approach and build on this alchemy of affective specificity and affective particularity to make something that feels queer, that does its politics, and theatre, in a queer way? In short, to see what it reveals about queer performance and queerness more broadly; and consider what queer performance can do to, and for, queer people.

Alyson Campbell is a director and dramaturg whose work spans a broad range of companies and venues in Australia, the UK and the US over the last 30+ years. She is Professor of Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where her research, artistic practice as a director, teaching and activism converge around gender and sexuality, particularly queer performance and dramaturgies and contemporary representations of HIV and AIDS.