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Performance Philosophy – After Tragedy

Theatre History Studies – Queer and Trans Readings of the Theatrical Past

Call for Papers: “Queer and Trans Readings of the Theatrical Past”

A Special Section of Theatre History Studies

Volume 45 (2025)

Co-Editors: Les Gray (they/them) and Kristin Leahey (she/her)

 

Elizabeth Freeman writes in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) of the epistemology of nonbinary and transgender people in history: “Trans studies has a history problem, albeit one that scholars from all branches of the field are busy working to address.” She contends that scholars need to argue that trans lives and scholarship existed prior to the coinage of trans terminology.[1] This special section of Theatre History Studies invites submissions that engage with what Freeman identifies as a historical “problem” in projects exploring queer and trans identities within and around the frame of theatre and performance, as well as disciplines/genres that have a performative connection, highlighting folks (real and perhaps imagined) who might more clearly be understood through contemporary queer and trans theory.[2]

In her foundational texts, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002) and Changed for the Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011), Stacy Wolf examines theatre history in relation to gender and sexuality by performing a queer spectatorship of canonical and commercial musicals, examining their female protagonists and the stars who played them. Forwarding this discourse, La Donna Forsgren in “The Wiz Redux; or, Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter” (2019), examines The Wiz as a “resistant reader,” wherein she relies on a lens of a “queer black feminist spectator” to reinterpret the well-known musical.[3] And Jack Isaac Pryor creates the term “time slips” to express those “moments”–often nonlinear–when both spectators and creators are able to rewrite past (and future) histories of racial and gendered violence through queer and trans performance practice in Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (2017).[4]

For this special section, we seek interlocutors invested in centering voices, who, in their time, may have desired a language to describe the specificities of queer genders and sexualities, but lacked access to a lexicon. Building on these exemplary works of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship and responding to Freeman’s critical call, we recognize the need to reflect on the marginalization and omission of histories of queer, nonbinary, and trans identities in theatre and performance archives and discourses. In the historical index, queerness and/or trans identities have been rendered invisible for many reasons including logics of their respective time period, the discrimination and violence historically directed at queer and trans people, and erasure of evidence and/or exclusion of language. Given this, we invite essays that attend to questions such as:

  • How can we as theatre and/or performance historiographers and historians, draw attention to these identities, histories, and narratives?
  • How can we make new and generative readings and what challenges arise in those readings? 
  • Whose histories need reclaiming?
  • What historically dominant ideologies and institutions forcibly extracted and diminished language for and legibility of queer and trans subjects? 
  • How does this work draw attention to minoritarian subjects and people of the past and present, while simultaneously acknowledging the marginalization of historical and contemporary queer and trans people and events?  

The co-editors welcome articles of 5,000-7,000 words, as well as pieces in alternate formats/lengths that engage with the themes of this special section. Submissions may include slippages, nonlinear, non-traditional, and non-white supremacist projects that embrace alternative research and writing delivery pathways.

Please send all manuscripts and inquiries to specialsectionTHS@gmail.com. Submissions are due by January 1, 2024.

Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Since 1981, Theatre History Studies has provided critical, analytical, and descriptive articles on all aspects of theatre history. The journal is devoted to disseminating the highest quality scholarly endeavors in order to promote understanding and discovery of world theatre history. Essays for the general section should be between 6,000-8,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Submissions in alternate formats will be considered on an individual basis. Illustrations are encouraged. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (here).

Theatre History Studies accepts submissions for its general section on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please send manuscripts for the general section to: Jocelyn L. Buckner, Editor, at ths.editor@matc.us.

 __________

[1]  Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Perverse Modernities. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2010. 5.

[2]  Freeman, 5.

[3] La Donna L. Forsgren. “The Wiz Redux; Or, Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter.” Theatre Survey 60, no. 3 (2019): 326.

[4] Jack Isaac Pryor. Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History. Performance Works. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017: 9.

Text content

the Black Theatre Review – Environmentalism

the Black Theatre Review (tBTR) is currently accepting submissions for Artistic Scholarship as Practice. This includes works of plays, multimedia, digital performance installations, and digital artistic works in the field and/or the discipline of Black theatre and performance. Our specific focus for this issue is Environmentalism. 

We are also accepting submissions for reflections in Notes from the Field. This includes the work of artistic practitioners (i.e. actors, designers, playwrights, dramaturgs, directors, curators, etc.) and their reflections on artistic practice in the field and/or the discipline of Black theatre and performance.

See our author guidelines at this link.
 
Submissions must be received by November 3, 2023, to the managing editor at mgibbs@iwu.edu. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference

The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference
Friday, March 22, 2024
The Historic New Orleans Collection
and Williams Research Center
New Orleans, LA

Founded in 1995, the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference is an annual one-day meeting held in the historic French Quarter as part of the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival. The week-long festival features writing workshops, theater events, literary panels, literary walking tours, music events, culinary events, and more.

Call for Proposals
Deadline for submissions:
November 6, 2023

Sessions at this one-day event do not consist of traditional conference papers. Instead, panels feature scholarly conversations that spring from Williams’s work and its many contexts and futures. We invite brief proposals for topics related to Tennessee Williams writ large.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • conceptual casting in productions of Williams’s plays
  • non-US-based productions, films, and contexts
  • production history and 21st-century dramaturgy
  • BIPOC representation in text and productions
  • connections between Williams and the work of other artists and creative professionals, including playwrights, poets, novelists, actors, and directors
  • how Williams fits into LGBTQ+ history and the present
  • intersectional feminist critiques
  • disability in Williams’s texts and productions
  • directing and adapting Williams in the 21st century
  • Williams’s influence on the cinema in the US and abroad
 
All sessions will be held in person in New Orleans; there are no virtual or hybrid sessions.

Proposals should include your name, affiliation (if applicable), contact information (including phone number and email), an abstract of 250 words about a proposed topic, and a 100-word bio. Submissions should specify any A/V needs. Because the special hotel rate offered to Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival attendees sells out quickly, those interested in staying at the festival hotel are encouraged to make their reservation as early as possible: visit the TW/NO Literary Festival website here.

Deadline:  Please email proposals to margit.longbrake@hnoc.org  by  Monday, November 6, 2023.

Stipends of $200 will be offered to panelists who participate in person. Panelists interested in submitting an essay on their topic to the Tennessee Williams Annual Review will be invited to schedule a virtual meeting with the managing editor of the Review, to discuss possibilities.

The conference organizers and the Tennessee Williams Annual Review are committed to reflecting a wide range of experience of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and physical ability. Scholars of the global majority are especially encouraged to submit proposals.

JADT 2024

The editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre are now accepting submissions for essays on any topics relating to theatre, drama, and popular entertainments of the Americas for consideration. Please submit completed manuscripts to jadtjournal@gmail.com by December 15, 2023 for consideration in the Fall 2024 issue.

Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Studies of dramatic texts from a purely literary perspective are outside the scope of the journal. Manuscripts should be 6,000 to 8,000 words in length and prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes. Completed manuscripts should be submitted as Microsoft Word attachments via e-mail to jadtjournal@gmail.com using Microsoft Word. Articles will be peer reviewed, so please allow 3 to 4 months for a decision. If you are using images, please provide the images and captions with your submission. (Please Note: images should be at least 300dpi and authors are responsible for securing permissions before submission)

JADT also publishes book reviews. If you would like to propose a review, please email Book Review Editor Dr. Maya Roth at jadtbookreviews@gmail.com.

 

ABOUT JADT

Founded in 1989, JADT is a widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal publishing thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas—past and present. The journal’s provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. JADT is fully online and freely accessible. https://jadtjournal.org/

JADT Co-Editors: Dr. Benjamin Gillespie & Dr. Bess Rowen

JADT Book Review Editor: Dr. Maya Roth

Theatre Annual 2024

 THEATRE ANNUAL
A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas

Call for Articles 2024 Issue
Deadline: January 15, 2024

Theatre Annual is the oldest theatre periodical continuously published in the United States. It is dedicated to examining theatre and performance of the Americas. We construe “America” broadly to include North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean Islands. Articles may treat work in these geographic areas or work from these areas that is presented elsewhere in the world. We welcome articles on the history and ethnography of performance, drawing from such areas as theatre studies, performance studies, popular culture, music, anthropology, dance, communication, philosophy, folklore, history, and areas of interest that cross disciplinary lines.

Submissions should follow the guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (endnotes, no Works Cited list). Authors should submit articles as Word attachments to the editor, Peter Reed, Department of English, University of Mississippi (preed@olemiss.edu). In order to assist in the anonymous peer review process, the author’s identity should not be revealed in the manuscript except on a separate title page that should also include full contact information (academic affiliation, mailing address, home, cell, and work telephone numbers, and email address). Articles should be 5,000 to 6,500 words long including notes. Illustrations are highly desirable; authors are responsible for securing rights. Submission deadline is January 15, 2024. Please allow at least eight weeks after the deadline for a response.

Scholars wishing to write book reviews for Theatre Annual are invited to send an inquiry to the book review editor, Michael Lueger (mlueger@gmail.com). If accepted, reviewers are asked to prepare their manuscripts in conformity with the guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style without footnotes and submit them as a Word attachment. Reviews should be 750 to 800 words for a review of a single book, 1,000 to 1,200 words for a two-book review, and 2,500 words for a five- or six-book review essay. Submission deadline is April 1, 2024. If publishers would like to send review copies, they should contact the book review editor via email to make arrangements.

Theatre Annual, founded in 1942 by the Theatre Library Association, is now published in the fall of each year by The College of William and Mary in Virginia, in association with the American Theatre and Drama Society. For more information on TA, see https://theatreannual.atds.org/.

Performing Arts Resources – Instruction

Performing Arts Resources
Instruction (2025 issue)

This issue of Performing Arts Resources will consider approaches to performing arts library instruction in higher education. Performing arts curricula are often composed of both history/theory courses and practice-based courses. Research libraries often struggle to meet the needs of students in history/theory classes who require access to materials like scripts, recordings of performances, and highly specialized databases. They struggle perhaps even more in meeting the needs of student practitioners who conduct research that is creative in nature, who often have information needs that span multiple disciplines, and whose research output is something other than citational scholarship. This poses challenges to those of us tasked with teaching research skills to performing arts students, prompting questions such as:

What are the unique instructional needs of performing arts students? Which pedagogical approaches are best suited to working with this population of learners? How might library instruction be more fully integrated into performing arts departments and programs? How can research libraries be adapted to the needs of creative researchers? How might instructional approaches differ between the numerous disciplines grouped under the rubric of “performing arts” (e.g. drama, performance studies, dance, etc.)?

This issue aims to explore these questions with contributions that might include (but are not limited to) essays, annotated lesson plans, and experiential narratives.

PAR is a peer-reviewed journal published by Michigan Publishing and is distributed to all members of the Theatre Library Association as a benefit of membership. Full text articles from current volumes and many past volumes of PAR are available in the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text and International Index for the Performing Arts Full Text.

Please submit abstracts by January 2, 2024 to issue editor Rye Gentleman, Librarian for Performing Arts, NYU (rye.gentleman@nyu.edu). Full drafts of articles will be due on June 2, 2024. Please email the editor if you would like to discuss article ideas or if you have questions.

 

the Black Theatre Review (tBTR) – Environmentalism

We are pleased to invite submissions that interrogate aesthetics, performativity, and matters of Environmentalism in Black and African Diasporic theatre history, contemporary performance and production, dramatic literature, digital art, artistic leadership, pedagogy and praxis, and nature-based religious and spiritual performativity. We invite authors to investigate, meditate and reflect on, and respond to:
  • Land acknowledgments.
  • Environmental sustainability conversations and the greening of theatre, performance, and production.
  • Environmental upheavals such as climate change, water crises, pollution, biodiversity, urban sprawl and gentrification, deforestation, etc. impact Blackness and Black cultures through performance (including theatre but not limited to dance, film, multimedia, etc.) frameworks.
  • Dramatic ecocriticism and “greenturgy”.
  • Ecotherapeutic performances as a pathway for healing.
  • Environmentalism and ancestral remembrance, power, resistance, and liberation.
  • Environmentalism and historical memory.
  • Approaches to reauthoring the historical memory of the environment through art.
  • Performances of anti-Blackness that impede access to the environment.
  • Performance of rituals to heal the land.
  • Environmentalism and rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation.
  • Nature-based sanctuaries, and religious and spiritual performativity.
tBTR seeks to publish original papers, book and performance reviews, technical and design notes, theoretical frameworks and perspectives, case studies, and works of multimedia. All issues will be centered on specific themes (as in the case of Environmentalism above). Special issues devoted to performance pieces and particular artists will occasionally be published as well. All issues of tBTR will be published online.

The last date for submissions is August 31, 2023. Early submissions will, however, receive preference in the review and publication process. Revision or acceptance notification is October 1, 2023 (with any subsequent revisions due by November 1, 2023). Please upload your full manuscript on our website at: https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/tbtr/submissions/. 
 
For questions about tBTR and/or the submission process, please contact Michelle Cowin Gibbs (Managing Editor) at mgibbs@iwu.edu. 

Queer and Trans Readings of the Theatrical Past – Theatre History Studies Special Section

Elizabeth Freeman writes in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) of the epistemology of nonbinary and transgender people in history: “Trans studies has a history problem, albeit one that scholars from all branches of the field are busy working to address.” She contends that scholars need to argue that trans lives and scholarship existed prior to the coinage of trans terminology.(1) This special section of Theatre History Studies invites submissions that engage with what Freeman identifies as a historical “problem” in projects exploring queer and trans identities within and around the frame of theatre and performance, as well as disciplines/genres that have a performative connection, highlighting folks (real and perhaps imagined) who might more clearly be understood through contemporary queer and trans theory.(2)

In her foundational texts, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002) and Changed for the Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011), Stacy Wolf examines theatre history in relation to gender and sexuality by performing a queer spectatorship of canonical and commercial musicals, examining their female protagonists and the stars who played them. Forwarding this discourse, La Donna Forsgren in “The Wiz Redux; or, Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter” (2019), examines The Wiz as a “resistant reader,” wherein she relies on a lens of a “queer black feminist spectator” to reinterpret the well-known musical.(3) And Jack Isaac Pryor creates the term “time slips” to express those “moments”–often nonlinear–when both spectators and creators are able to rewrite past (and future) histories of racial and gendered violence through queer and trans performance practice in Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (2017).(4)

For this special section, we seek interlocutors invested in centering voices, who, in their time, may have desired a language to describe the specificities of queer genders and sexualities, but lacked access to a lexicon. Building on these exemplary works of feminist, queer, and trans scholarship and responding to Freeman’s critical call, we recognize the need to reflect on the marginalization and omission of histories of queer, nonbinary, and trans identities in theatre and performance archives and discourses. In the historical index, queerness and/or trans identities have been rendered invisible for many reasons including logics of their respective time period, the discrimination and violence historically directed at queer and trans people, and erasure of evidence and/or exclusion of language. Given this, we invite essays that attend to questions such as:

  • How can we as theatre and/or performance historiographers and historians, draw attention to these identities, histories, and narratives?
  • How can we make new and generative readings and what challenges arise in those readings?
  • Whose histories need reclaiming?
  • What historically dominant ideologies and institutions forcibly extracted and diminished language for and legibility of queer and trans subjects?
  • How does this work draw attention to minoritarian subjects and people of the past and present, while simultaneously acknowledging the marginalization of historical and contemporary queer and trans people and events?

The co-editors welcome articles of 5,000-7,000 words, as well as pieces in alternate formats/lengths that engage with the themes of this special section. Submissions may include slippages, nonlinear, non-traditional, and non-white supremacist projects that embrace alternative research and writing delivery pathways.

Please send all manuscripts and inquiries to specialsectionTHS@gmail.com. Submissions are due by January 1, 2024.

Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Since 1981, Theatre History Studies has provided critical, analytical, and descriptive articles on all aspects of theatre history. The journal is devoted to disseminating the highest quality scholarly endeavors in order to promote understanding and discovery of world theatre history. Essays for the general section should be between 6,000-8,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Submissions in alternate formats will be considered on an individual basis. Illustrations are encouraged. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (here).

Theatre History Studies accepts submissions for its general section on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please send manuscripts for the general section to: Jocelyn L. Buckner, Editor, at ths.editor@matc.us.

1 Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Perverse Modernities. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2010. 5.

2 Freeman, 5.

3 La Donna L. Forsgren. “The Wiz Redux; Or, Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter.” Theatre Survey 60, no. 3 (2019): 326.

4 Jack Isaac Pryor. Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History. Performance Works. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2017: 9.

Theatre Journal Special Issue – Abolition and Performance

In the US, calls for prison abolition have gained momentum in recent years and have reinforced the distinction between reform (developing less violent methods of policing, for example) and abolition (creating a world where policing is not necessary). Abolition as an alternative to reform animates many justice movements that seek to eradicate structural inequality. Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a self-described “drama school doctoral-program dropout,” integrates political and artistic labors, noting, via Karl Marx, that “By mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That’s what drama is; that’s what geography is: making history, making worlds.”(1) The notion that performance is world-making, as advanced in the formative scholarship of Dorinne Kondo, is moving quickly from a galvanizing and activating premise to a given (though no less radical) assumption for scholars of theatre, performance, and dance studies. Kondo’s theory (2) entwines aesthetic, social, and political domains of experience and integrates analysis of artistic and cultural production into a larger project of naming and resisting the ongoing devastations of what Gilmore calls never-not racial capitalism. For this special issue on “Abolition and Performance,” Theatre Journal invites submissions that consider how abolition and its historical and theoretical concerns of the plantation, carcerality, and liberation shift our understandings of performance as world-making, un-making, and re-making.

Plantation logics and their afterlives in the criminal punishment system rely upon regimes of authority that enact subordination, incapacitation, and extraction intended towards world-ending. We could, alongside Katherine McKittrick and others, think of these regimes as choreographies of space, time, bodies, energy, and breath.(3) Sociopolitical engines of the plantationocene – labor extraction, racialization, and capital accumulation – intersect histories of performance and their aesthetics and economies. Simultaneously, we could pay attention to what McKittrick has called “plantation futures.”(4)  In such futures-lived-now, the plantation, the prison, and other spaces of enclosure may not always be separable from affirmative instantiations of sovereignty for oppressed peoples. Carceral aesthetics, as recently developed by Nicole R. Fleetwood, is one example of holding both the violences and futures of these sites together.(5) For this special issue, we ask how might performance offer insights into relations of freedom and un-freedom; practices of thingification, disposability, and non-humanity; enactments of property, ownership, and communality; and reassertions of white supremacy, such as white deputization? What are the relationships between performance and organizing, protesting, policing, the criminal punishment system, and alternative structures of justice?

Abolition discourse often emphasizes class struggle and its interlocking alignments with racial, gender, and sexual liberation, coming out of the Black Radical tradition and its thinkers’ and movers’ relationships to global Black freedom movements, such as W.E.B. DuBois’s call for abolition democracy during the Reconstruction Era. Criminalization and incarceration disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous people in the Americas and are widespread tools for asserting hierarchies of dominance globally as part of the afterlives of both slavery and colonialism. As the “intimacies” of globalization, following Lisa Lowe, touch myriad geographies, temporalities, and socialities, so too does abolition travel, overlapping in rhetorical and political usage with anticolonization.(6) Abolition movements, practices, legislation, resistance, figures, and events are all of relevance to this call, and the journal welcomes submissions with transnational frameworks, understanding the project of liberation to be a broad one that is nonetheless articulated in specific times and places using the resources available.

This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal coeditor Ariel Nereson. We will consider both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for short provocations, video and/or photo essays, and other creative, multimedia material for our online platform (500-2,000 words). For information about submission, visit: https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines Submissions for the print journal (6,000-9,000 words) and for the online platform (500-2,000 words) should reach us no later than December 1, 2023.

Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal.

Editor Ariel Nereson (anereson@buffalo.edu) and Online Editor Tarryn Chun (tchun@nd.edu) welcome questions and inquiries.

1 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 26, 28.

2 Dorinne Kondo, World-Making: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

3 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

4 Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (2013): 1-15. For plantations as sites of sovereignty and futurity, see also Eve Dunbar, “Genres of Enslavement: Ruptured Temporalities of Black Unfreedom and the Resurfacing Plantation” (The South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 [2022]: 53-73) and Julius B. Fleming Jr., “Transforming Geographies of Black Time: How the Free Southern Theater Used the Plantation for Civil Rights Activism” (American Literature 91, no. 3 [2019]: 587-617).

5 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). For another transnational framework of the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, see Rinaldo Walcott, On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2021).

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