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Abstract
The possibilities of performance to move audience/participants into challenging, resistant, and self-reflexive spaces is wrought with complications, notably, the complex ways dominant discourses quickly recuperate acts of resistance. This essay documents and theorizes our weekend-long Gayla celebration: a political performance project of love, community, protest, and activism that enacted a series of performative rituals reconfiguring notions of family, kinship, and patriarchy. Initially conceived as a ritualized celebration of our relations, both with each other and with our multiple families, we later made the decision to craft this self-reflective essay to examine and theorize the socio-political stakes, potentials, and shortcomings of the Gayla as a form of queer performance protest. We theorize queer utopian performance through the concepts of wander and futurity, examining moments of queer potentiality, queer imaginary, and discursive rupture, while also exploring how the performance event was audienced, negotiated, and recuperated through dominant discursive frames.
Acknowledgements
The authors worked collaboratively in the generation of this essay and would like to explicitly mark their equal and shared contribution, rather than designating a lead author.
The authors would like to thank Roshan Kalantar, Kimberlee Pérez, and Jennifer Linde for their contributions in helping to shape and organize the Gayla. In addition, we would like to thank Dr. Heather Carver, Dr. Heidi Rose and the two anonymous reviewers for their tremendous support and assistance in shaping the ideas in this essay.