Abstract
Theorising the roles of affect and activism in contemporary queer performance this chapter analyses the performance art of one of the most visible contemporary black, queer, trans artists in the UK, London-based Travis Alabanza. Applying queer, feminist affect-based ethnographic and archival methods to Alabanza’s use of poetry, spoken word performance, performative storytelling, soundscape and lip-syncing, this chapter deconstructs their performed response to the Queer British Art (1861–1967) exhibition at Tate Britain in June 2017, entitled Left Outside Alone. Through a mixed-method approach, this chapter provides insight into how the interplay of queer trans black and cis-white embodiment affects experiences of activist art, and how, through activating audience members’ negative affect, performance can be productive and political.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Adams, Tony E., and Stacy Holman Jones. 2011. ‘Telling Stories: Reflexivity, Queer Theory, and Auto Ethnography’. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 11 (2): 108–116.
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2007. ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness.’ Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–168.
Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alabanza, Travis. 2017. Before You Step Outside [You Love Me]. [chapbook]. London: Travis Alabanza.
Alabanza, Travis. 2018a. ‘Semi-structured Interview with Rebecca Tadman.’ March 5, 2018. Hammersmith, London.
Alabanza, Travis. 2018b. ‘Travis Albanza Queer and Now Performance at the Tate’. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3vm7OQjcQw. Accessed 1 October 2018.
Alabanza, Travis. 2018c. ‘Queering a Practice, Not Just the Art’. Arts and Humanities Lecture Series talk. May 2, 2018. Royal College of Art, London.
Allen, Samantha. 2017. ‘Whatever Happened to the Transgender Tipping Point?’ The Daily Beast, March 31. https://www.thedailybeast.com/whatever-happened-to-the-transgender-tipping-point. Accessed 08 March 2018.
Anastacia. Left Outside Alone. 2003. On Anastacia [CD single, digital download, 12” single]. Burbank, CA: O’Henry Sound Studios. Epic Records, Daylight Records. Copyright held by Universal Music.
Arts Council England. 2018. Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case: A Data Report, 2016–17. London: Arts Council England, January 15. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/equality-diversity-and-creative-case-data-report-2016-17. Accessed 03 June 2018.
Aymer, Samuel R. 2016. ‘“I Can’t Breathe”: A Case Study—Helping Black men Cope with Race-Related Trauma Stemming from Police Killing and Brutality.’ Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26 (3–4): 367–376.
Barker, Meg-John. 2017. ‘A Trans Review of 2017: The Year of Transgender Moral Panic’. The Conversation, December 27. https://theconversation.com/a-trans-review-of-2017-the-year-of-transgender-moral-panic-89272. Accessed 03 March 2018.
Barlow, Claire, ed. 2017. Queer British Art 1861–1967. London: Tate Publishing.
Bishop, Ishmael. 2018. ‘You Can’t Have Pride Without Marsha P. Johnson’. Th-Ink Medium. June 3. https://medium.com/th-ink/pride-you-cant-have-pride-without-marsha-p-johnson-24db5d41b320. Accessed 14 June 2018.
Brereton, John C. 1999. ‘Rethinking Our Archive: A Beginning.’ College English 61 (5): 574–576.
Bull, Michael, et al. 2006. ‘Introducing Sensory Studies.’ Senses and Society 1 (1): 5–7.
Butcher, Ryan. 2018. ‘We Asked 14 Trans Activists How Cis People Can Be Better Allies in 2018.’ Indy100, Independent, May 17. https://www.indy100.com/article/trans-lives-shon-faye-juno-dawson-riley-carter-india-willoughby-travis-alabanza-annie-wallace-8099866. Accessed 5 March 2018.
Campbell, Alyson, and Stephen Farrier. 2016. Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campkin, Ben, and Laura Marshall. 2016. LGBTQI Nightlife in London from 1986 to the Present: Interim Findings. London: UCL Urban Lab.
Casey, Mark E. 2017. ‘The Queer Unwanted and Their Undesirable “Otherness.”’ In Geographies of Sexualities, edited by Jason Lim, 139–150. London: Routledge.
Chatzipapatheodoridis, Constantine. 2017. ‘Strike a Pose, Forever: The Legacy of Vogue and Its Re-contextualization in Contemporary Camp Performances.’ European Journal of American Studies 11 (11–3): 1–15.
Conquergood, Dwight. 2006. ‘Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics.’ In The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, edited by Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, 351–365. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1994. ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour.’ Stanford Law Review 43 (1994): 1241–1299.
Daboo, Jerri. 2018. ‘The Arts Britain Still Ignores?’ Studies in Theatre and Performance 38 (1): 3–8.
Denzin, Norman K. . 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
DiAngelo, Robin. 2011. ‘White Fragility.’ the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3 (3): 54–70.
Fluide. 2018. ‘In Conversation with... Travis Alabanza.’ Fluide online, June 4. https://www.fluide.us/blogs/futurefluide/in-conversation-with-travis-alabanza. Accessed 06 June 2018.
Freshwater, Helen. 2009. Theatre and Audience. London: Macmillan International Higher Education.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ed. 1996. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York, NY: New York University Press.
hooks, bell. 2003. ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.’ In The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 115–131. New York: Routledge.
hooks, bell, ed. 1992. ‘Is Paris Burning?’ In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 145–156. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Jones, Amelia, ed. 2012. ‘Queer Feminist Durationality: Time and Materiality as a Means of Resisting Spatial Objectification.’ In A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts, edited by Amelia Jones and Seeing Differently, 170–217. Oxford: Routledge.
Kidd, Jeremy D., and Taryn M. Witten. 2008. ‘Transgender and Transsexual Identities: The Next Strange Fruit – Hate Crimes, Violence, and Genocide Against the Global Trans Communities.’ Journal of Hate Studies 6 (1): 31–63.
Kiselica, Mark S. 1999. ‘Confronting My Own Ethnocentrism and Racism: A Process of Pain and Growth.’ Journal of Counseling & Development 77 (1): 14–17.
Klein, Jennie. 2013. ‘Review: Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.’ CAA Reviews, November 6. https://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2215#.WTxSrOvyvIU. Accessed 20 April 2018.
Klonaris, Maria, and Katerina Thomadaki. 2002. ‘Dissident Bodies: Freeing the Gaze from Norms’. In Body and Representation, edited by Insa Härtel and Sigrid Schade, 143–157. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.
Monks, Aoife. 2010. The Actor in Costume. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mulvey, Laura, ed. 1989. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, vol. 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Murray, Georgia. 2017. ‘What Navigating Public Space Is Like As A Trans Person.’ Refinery29, August 9. www.refinery29.uk/2017/08/166568/travis-alabanza-before-i-step-outside. Accessed 10 March 2018.
O'Brien, Dave, and Kate Oakley. 2015. Cultural Value and Inequality: A Critical Literature Review. Arts and Humanities Research Council. https://creativealliance.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Report-Cultural-Value-Inequality_A-Critical-Literature-Review-Arts-and-Humanities-Reseach-Council.pdf. Accessed 03 May 2018.
Paris Is Burning. 1991. Documentary Film Directed by Jennie Livingston. Miramax.
Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.
Potts, Morgan. 2012. ‘Cis Fragility.’ Trans Student Educational Resources, February 22. https://transstudent.tumblr.com/post/139943203874/morgan-potts-cis-fragility-this-article-was. Accessed 19 April 2018.
Rankine, Claudia. 2016. ‘Sound and Fury.’ The New Yorker, March 28. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/sound-fury-by-claudia-rankine. Accessed 05 May 2018.
Ritchie, Andrea J. 2017. Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Schulman, Sarah. 2013. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
Snorton, Riley C., and Jin Haritaworn. 2013. ‘Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife’. In Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, 66–76. New York: Routledge.
Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-colonial Critic. Edited by Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge.
Steinmetz, Katy. 2014. ‘The Transgender Tipping Point.’ Time, May 29. https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/. Accessed 30 March 2018.
Stryker, Susan, and Aren Z. Aizura, eds. 2013. Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge.
Yancy, George. 2016. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Travis Alabanza for creating their powerful work which inspired this research, for their graciousness and time, and for consenting to and collaborating with this analysis.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tadman, B. (2021). Activating Cis-White Fragility: The Oppositional Gaze in Travis Alabanza’s Left Outside Alone. In: Rosenberg, T., D'Urso, S., Winget, A.R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69555-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69555-2_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69554-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69555-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)