Project description
The Queer-Trans Performance Family Tree Project is an interactive, open-access, digital exhibit which visually connects trans and gender nonconforming artists working in the United States today to the collectives and communities that have supported our work over the past several decades. Because of the ways that trans and gender nonconforming artists have largely been excluded from mainstream theatre and arts institutions, there is a perception among members of the industry, academia, and the general public alike that our community has suddenly “appeared” in the last few years. Put simply, this project aims to correct that prevailing narrative. We’ve been here.
However, for many of the same reasons that trans/GNC artists have been excluded from commercial and regional theatre–we don’t fit into realism-driven stories written for a proscenium stage by, for, and about cis-het white (upper/middle class, ablebodied) men–we’ve also been left out of historical records and archives. When I tried to approach writing a history of trans theatre in the U.S., using the traditional tools of theatre historians, I found that analysis of plays, reviews, performance ephemera, and details of individual artists’ accolades didn’t quite fit. On the whole, us queer folk tend to resist straight-forward, linear narratives. Those tools don’t lend themselves to highlighting connections between artists, or projects that defy genre, systems of support and coalitions built through years of cross-community collaboration, or the ways that our art and our activist work beyond the walls of the theatre (or more often club, bar, community center) are inextricable from one another. So, this project is an attempt to present histories of queer-trans performance in a way that can more accurately reflect their intersectionality, their activist roots, and the networks of support that we have built for one another.
Goals for the project
- Document and present contemporary and historical trans performance in a way that emphasizes mentorship, collaboration, and inter-community solidarity across space and time.
- Create a digital archive of stories, recorded with trans artists, about the collaborators and mentors who have influenced their work, origin stories of specific performances, experiences working in queer-centric and social justice-oriented spaces.
- Lay the groundwork for future ongoing collaboration with other artists, historians, and scholars to grow a collectively-sourced, publicly-accessible archive of transgender performance history.
A few things to note
In no way do I purport to present a definitive history of transgender performance in the United States. Quite the opposite, actually. The Queer-Trans Performance Family Tree Project, by design, will never be complete. This is not a lamentation of the impossibility of the task. Rather, it is an intentional and queer orientation to trans histories.
It is a radical openness to a range of possibilities for what these histories may look like, who is involved, and where they take place.
It is a celebration of the fact that, now that we can find each other more easily, trans and gender nonconforming artists are creating new work, making new connections, tying together and growing new branches of the QT artistic family tree faster than I will ever be able to write it all down.
It is a refusal to present trans art or lives in a way that is neatly packaged, polished, and legible for institutions that were never intended to include us.
It is an acknowledgement that there are so many more queer and trans and gender nonconforming artists, thinkers, and activists whose names we will never know. Whom we have lost to the violence of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Who should be part of the stories
It is an invitation to co-construct our histories in community.
I am thrilled to invite you into this ambitious, sprawling journey into trans-queer storytelling and history. I hope you’ll join me.