Performing Queer Modernism

Penny Farfan

Interdisciplinary in focus, encompassing theatre and dance
In-depth case studies of well-known and highly visible stage plays and dance performances
Models queer, feminist, and interdisciplinary critical and historiographic methodologies

Performing Queer Modernism

Penny Farfan

Description

Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noël Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

Performing Queer Modernism

Penny Farfan

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Performing Queer Modernism
1. "This feverish, jealous attachment of Paula's for Ellean": Homosocial Desire and the Production of Queer Modernism
2. "Fairy of Light": Performative Ghosting and the Queer Uncanny
3. "Without the assistance of any girls": Queer Sex and the Shock of the New
4. "I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives": Popular Plato, Queer Heterosexuality, Comic Form
5. "What are you trying to say?" - "I'm saying it": Queer Performativity in and across Time
Epilogue: "what is termed Sin is an essential element of progress"
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Performing Queer Modernism

Penny Farfan

Author Information

Penny Farfan, Professor of Drama, University of Calgary

Penny Farfan is Professor of Drama at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Women, Modernism, and Performance, the co-editor of Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century, and a past editor of Theatre Journal. In 2015, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education's Excellence in Editing Award for sustained career achievement and the Women and Theatre Program's Achievement Award for Scholarship.

Performing Queer Modernism

Penny Farfan

Reviews and Awards

"Bringing together a selection of queer performances, artists, and authors, Farfan argues that citational slippages such as homosocial desire, uncanny doubles, and androgynous heterosexuality in the reiteration of sex/gender norms onstage played a major role in shaping and reflecting the spectrum of emerging modern sexual identities... In these different case studies, Farfan repeatedly asserts queer performances as powerfully subversive yet insufficiently recognized realities in modernist scholarship." - Didier Morelli, TDR: The Drama Review

"Considering plays and performances, dance and bodies, uncanny ghostings and productive slippages, Farfans crystalline prose, elegant insights, and multidisciplinary subjects and methods make for an illuminating, generative read." - Jill Dolan, author of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater

"This book luminously reveals how queerness created modernism through a spinning prism of performances onstage and offstage, legitimate and illegitimate, embodied and literary ... Farfans richly erudite, sinewy writing memorably captures the dense interweaving of sexual and aesthetic dissonance that circulated among audiences as well as performers and writers during this transformational era — and beyond." - Kim Marra, Professor of Theatre Arts and American Studies, University of Iowa