Moderator: Wes Pearce
Location: Room 1177 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Presenté par le Département de littératures et de langues du monde – Université de Montréal
“Things Better Not Remembered”: Censoring Queer Trauma in Daniel MacIvor’s Somewhere I Have Never Travelled and Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden
Daniel MacIvor’s play Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (1988) and Thom Fitzgerald’s film The Hanging Garden (1997) explore intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse through the narrative structure of homecoming. Each work centers on a man who has moved to Toronto and—years later—returns to his rural Nova Scotian hometown to take part in a major family event. These men must reckon with memories of a tumultuous shared past, coloured by physical abuse, alcoholism, and, in the case of Fitzgerald’s film, homophobia. Significantly, MacIvor’s play does not explicitly address an intersection between sexuality and childhood trauma. Though Somewhere I Have Never Travelled is semi-autobiographical, its main character’s queerness is censored. This artistic compromise was, for MacIvor, “another form of closeting” (Grignard 195). While The Hanging Garden premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim, MacIvor’s Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, first performed at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre nine years earlier, was poorly received by critics and remains unpublished. Identifying the censorship of MacIvor’s script as a form of injustice, we ask: what does Fitzgerald realize in The Hanging Garden that MacIvor is prevented from exploring in Somewhere I Have Never Travelled? How do trauma, queerness, and justice interact in Fitzgerald’s film, and how might these themes have served MacIvor’s play? Through comparative analysis, and with the use of archival materials, we explore the reception of these performances and posit that censorship and the obfuscation of homophobia is an injustice which results in the loss of vital queer narratives.
Bridget Baldwin, University of Guelph
Bridget Baldwin is a PhD student at the University of Guelph. She received her BA in English and Philosophy from Cape Breton University. She completed her MA in English at the University of Guelph with the support of SSHRC-CGSM. Her research interrogates settler conceptions of “home” in Nova Scotian performance.
Magdalina El-Masry
Magdalina El-Masry earned her BFA in Film Studies and her MA in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Her MA thesis is a study of dramatic film performance in American cinema through the lens of intensity. Her research interests include film historiography, performance studies, and adaptation.
Justice for Drag Queen Storytime: Considering the Legal Value of Drag for Young Audiences
In 2023, I was contacted by the law firm McCarthy Tétrault in regard to a definition involving Rainbow Alliance Dryden’s Drag Queen Story Hour and conservative blogger Brian Webster. In the week’s that followed I produced an affidavit for the case that aimed to explain “the cultural significance of drag.” While I have spent much of my career analyzing, and teaching students about the cultural significance of drag, I typically approach this task from an academic position, drawing on a blend of queer theory, theatre studies, and performance studies discourses. My experience producing a 15-page legal document that defended drag as not only a legitimate art form but an important cultural practice both drew on my existing expertise in the field while simultaneously challenging me to rethink how I understand the cultural value of drag, particularly in the context of theatre for young audiences.
For this conference paper, I will reflect on my experience writing this document and consulting with a legal team that comes at drag queen story time from a legal and justice-based framework. I will analyze how a shift towards a legal framework and legal discourse necessitated a rethinking of my own position on drag’s function, particularly as it applies to accessibility, activism, and cultural value. In doing so this paper will more broadly raise questions about theatre and performance studies’ value to legal discourse as well as how considering theatre’s function from a legal/justice-based perspective can broaden and extend our own research and teaching.
Cameron Crookston, UBC Okanagan
Cameron Crookston is a lecturer in cultural studies at UBC Okanagan. He holds a PhD in theatre and performance studies from the University of Toronto. He teaches classes on popular culture and queer performance and is the editor of the anthology The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Queer Vocabularies and Solidarities in the Theatre of Fake Friends
New York theatre company Fake Friends has earned recognition in recent years for their irreverent, confrontational, multi-media work: after the success of their show Circle Jerk (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and then winner of an Obie), an earlier work, This American Wife, enjoyed a reworked digital production in 2021. The show revisits the cultural product that brought Fake Friends’ members together as collaborators in the first place: reality TV’s The Real Housewives. In the play, cameras follow three gay men through a soulless Long Island McMansion as they recite and refashion a litany of Housewives references – a litany indeed, for the source material takes on almost scriptural significance. But the structure breaks down, subject to the same ontological uncertainties that tease viewers of all reality television: surely, we know this ostentatious posturing is fabricated for the camera, and yet, just how much of it might in fact be real? By the time we reach the play’s coda – staged like a Housewives reunion – we are asked to contemplate what exactly is at stake for gay male identity (at least a narrow segment of it) in a shared vocabulary so rooted in conflict and class pretension. I argue that This American Wife, in adapting the Housewives archive, stages the affinities and antagonisms of a contemporary gay habitus replete with the sensual pleasures of class fantasy while, at once, hostile and masochistic, tracing the knife’s edge that separates vanity and cruelty from the possibility for queer connection and solidarity.
Alex Ferrone, l’Université de Montréal
Alex Ferrone is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de Littératures et de Langues du Monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature and theatre history. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021).