Staging the family unfamiliar: the queer intimacies in Ramble-Ations: A One D’Lo Show

ABSTRACT

Queer personal narratives that include family storytelling draw attention to normative conventions that produce queer family members’ sexuality as a “stage” through which they pass. Simultaneously, queer personal narratives call on nonnormative discourses to generate queer worldmaking sites of kinship and belonging. In this essay, I look to the ways D’Lo’s Ramble-Ations: A One D’Lo Show uses personal narrative and family storytelling to stage refusals and reconfigurations of familiar splits among race, sexuality, and gender. Using performative writing and critical analysis, I use stages and stagings to argue the family unfamiliar opens queer intimate relations with and through an audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Stage
• personal narrative
• queer intimacy
• family storytelling
• audience

Acknowledgements

The author thanks editors Mindy Fenske and Craig Gingrich Philbrook for their generous editorial support. Further thanks for their feedback and support in all the ways to Adela Licona, Caroline Yang, Lezlie Frye, Laura Fugikawa, Sheena Malhotra, Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, and the anonymous reviewers. With gratitude to D’Lo for the labor of performance, sitting with me in conversation, and sharing video documentation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.