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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.
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.
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
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.
"Exceptionally well-documented, and illustrated with relevant
production artifacts, this vibrant contribution to performance
history through the dual lenses of modernist and queer theory is an
informative, enjoyable, and often delightful read." -- David
Pellegrini, New England Theatre Journal
"Where does one look for queer modernism? In her rich and
compelling investigation, Penny Farfan finds examples in the
interstices of disciplines and forms, genders and sexualities.
Considering plays and performances, dance and bodies, uncanny
ghostings and productive slippages, Farfan's 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. Like the turns
of butch femme fatale Loie Fuller's Fire Dance, images and insights
of one chapter linger as the next ones flash into view. Farfan's
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
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