Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011

This article is a consideration of the ways that transgender performers and queer bodies in performance contribute to the ongoing formation of the category of gender. It explores the relationship between performing transgendered masculinities and the constitutive potential of the law (namely the Gender Recognition Act 2004) surrounding (trans)gender identity. The article looks at examples of performance by transgender performance artists, Jason Barker staged as part of the annual Transfabulous International Festival of Transgender Arts in 2006 and 2007 and Lazlo Pearlman in He Was a Sailor, the Sea Was Inside Him (Drill Hall, London, 2007). Trans and queer performance work is still, for the most part, left out of academic discourse within performance studies. Engaging with trans art and trans artists in relation to shifts in legislation around gender brings very specific readings into the public domain. This record of performance that takes place beyond the mainstream brings transgender and genderqueer performance practice to the fore.

How and where do fat gay men living in cultures that vilify them for both their weight and their sexual identity go to find affirming, constructive images of men like them engaging in acts of intimacy that run the gamut of kissing to engaging in ordinary sexual acts to expressing love? Using Ann Cvetkovich's theory of the everyday life of queer trauma as a starting point, this article presents pornographic performances on websites, films and video as key sites where fat gay men can find such positive representations of themselves. Ultimately, this article argues for and exemplifies scholarship in sexuality studies that considers pornography contextually and not monolithically, because it can do much good for viewers who cannot find their sexual and romantic lives depicted in many other places, satisfying the ethical necessity that adults of all body types be taken seriously as sexual beings.

This article considers the public intellectual Fran Lebowitz as a performer located within a camp tradition, exploring how her performance challenges notions of public and private in contemporary American culture and in so doing offers a queer alternative to dominant formulations of the public sphere. Lebowitz combines the theatricality of traditional camp with ethical seriousness in her public, performed identity as self-appointed judge of contemporary American life. At the same time, in the ironic gap between the verbosity of her identity as public speaker and her own paralysed literary output, Lebowitz enacts a tacit elegy to a 'lost public' of New York artists and their equally decimated audience. The links between her highly publicized writer's block and the impact of AIDS on the New York cultural scene suggest ways in which Lebowitz queers the elegiac mode by presenting a frustrated silence running parallel to her virtuosic verbal fluency. This analysis of Lebowitz's public persona returns continually to the ethical and aesthetic implications of a mode of performance that simultaneously invites democratic engagement while repelling notions of community grounded in the pollution of civic space with private concerns.

Does God love gay people? Do gay, lesbian and transgendered people have the right to religious experience and spiritual development? Can one be gay and Christian? Do sexual orientation and sexual practices labelled as abhorrent within mainstream religious doctrine and dogma block 'queer' individuals from the salvation and redemption offered to those who choose to follow the prescriptions of theological cosmologies? Is celibacy the only choice that the sexually scrutinized can make in order to be saved within the discourse of theological morality? How does one reconcile a forgiving Jesus with an unforgiving religion? In the public sphere, these are few of the ethical questions around homosexuality, faith in God and religion in the United States raised in Geoffrey Nauffts's Next Fall (2009).1 Theatre practice allows us to grapple with these challenging ideological and legal issues through the experience of real time and imagined characters. This unique combination of phenomenology and fictional representations of character types creates an ethical laboratory through which to experiment with the inherent tensions in these complex issues. This article will examine how Next Fall challenges both the ideology of religion and the ideology of what it means to be a gay man in contemporary times.

'Misplaced Memoirs' by Qasim Riza Shaheen was the outcome of a year-long artist residency at Contact in Manchester in 2011/2012. Over the course of a year, Shaheen posted a series of self-portraits in online instalments on the Contact website. This collection of imagery and text culminated in a live performance at Queer Contact Festival in February 2012 where the artist set a scenography for a limited audience to experience the work on a one-to-one basis, making for an intimate encounter with the performer and 'Misplaced Memoirs'. Notions of queerness, unrequited love and performance in the life, so far, of an artist were declared in an autobiographical and confessional manner. Shaheen explores the fluidity and transcultural nature of queer identity through stories of personal desire, past relationships and an expressed urgency for the ritual of marriage before turning 40. Furthermore, and central to the performativity of his memoirs, Shaheen invited a male model to re-enact the moments of his personal history, thereby foregrounding both a play of identities being exchanged and the transferability of ownership of shared private incidents and sacred memories. Borrowed interpretations and the staging of the lived and the trespassed within the narratives propose a reimagining of personal history and how the embodied as archive can be interchangeable. With his 'Misplaced Memoirs', Shaheen publicly discloses his personal voice as an act of self-distribution through which he attempts to redraw the ethical boundaries both between his own private and public spaces and between his queer identity and his religiosity.

FEMINIST VISIONS AND QUEER FUTURES IN POSTCOLONIAL DRAMA: COMMUNITY, KINSHIP, AND CITIZENSHIP, KANIKA BATRA (2011) Abingdon: Routledge, 178 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87591, hbk, £85

THE DRAMA OF MARRIAGE: GAY PLAYWRIGHTS/STRAIGHT UNIONS FROM OSCAR WILDE TO THE PRESENT, JOHN M. CLUM (2011) Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp., ISBN: 9780230338401, hbk, £55.00

CHANGED FOR GOOD: A FEMINIST HISTORY OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL, STACY WOLF (2011) New York: Oxford University Press, 306 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-537824-5, pbk, $24.95

QUEER POLITICAL PERFORMANCE AND PROTEST, BENJAMIN SHEPARD (2010) New York and London: Routledge, 308 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-96096-0, hbk, £80