Affect, Performance, and Ethnographic Methods in Queer Bathroom Monologues

Abstract

As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement with queer theory and transgender countercultural aesthetics. There is also an investment in a transcendental truth that negates the possibilities of staging the emotive and unknowable dimensions of the gendered subject. Performance ethnography has become a pedagogically exciting methodological form because it can emotionally engage audiences in topics they would normally avoid. However, such topics must incite curiosity and critical questioning, as opposed to definitive truth claims and easy answers. As evidenced by the play Queer Bathroom Monologues (QBM)—my case study—audiences engage, refuse, query, contest, affectively respond to, and ignore, the difficult and disturbing excesses of research about queer and transgender material.

Keywords:

• Performance ethnography
• Queer theory
• Transgender studies
• Performance studies