For the Future, the Past: LGBT2Q Theatre, Performance, and Scholarship in Canada

In her introduction to Queer Theatre in Canada, Roz Kerr notes the dearth of historical work in the field: “It is really only in the mid-nineties that articles dealing with queer theatre pertaining to English Canadian scholars and theatre practitioners/spectators begin to appear” (viii). The extant scholarship on queer Canadian theatre and performance in English, which Kerr brings together admirably in her anthology, coincides with the rise of queer politics and theory as social and political formations, and, importantly, as a scholarly approach in the early 1990s. The essays in her anthology are a testament to this academic trend. Of the twenty-one articles only two were published before 1994, and among these at least eleven are “queer” in their methodology, theoretical framework, or focus—including my own contribution. Kerr suggests that her “volume has a heavy concentration on the last fifteen years in recognition that queer theatre really only begins during the 1990s” (viii). This point is important. Kerr differentiates “queer” theatre from earlier gay and lesbian theatre, noting: “By the early 1990s the term queer replaced gay and lesbian in recognition of the need to move beyond the identity politics they implied” (viii). While queer did not exactly replace gay and lesbian, the need for the term and the political and theoretical positionality it denoted was brought about by a set of historical forces: in the late-1980s and early 1990s, inspired by post-structuralist theories of identity, debates about the limits of identity politics, and in the wake of the AIDS crisis, the term was reclaimed and redeployed within specific social, political, and scholarly contexts in the Anglo-American world (queer theory and politics did not, for example, take firm hold in francophone Quebec). Similarly, in a number of scholarly fields, but especially in literary, theatre, and performance studies, queer theory became a highly productive rubric and approach in the 1990s, precipitating a wide array of important research. But what of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, and queer (LGBT2Q) theatre and performance produced in Canada before the 1990s? 1 Without sounding cliché, how are Canada’s LGBT2Q theatre and performing artists, as well as its scholars and students, to understand the present, and to map out the future, when so very little is known about our individualized and collective pasts?

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