More than just theatre: queer theatre festivals as sites of queer community building, learning, activism, and leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through lenses of social movement theories, queer theory, intersectionality, performativity, and performance theory, my study employed a qualitative queer(y)ing methodology to explore how three queer theatre festivals contribute to the production of knowledge and learning, community building, and leadership and activism in the queer social movement in Canada. The queer theatre festivals included the Rhubarb festival, Toronto; Pretty, Witty and GAY!, Lethbridge; and OUTstages, Victoria. Data collection methods included participant observation through festival attendance, a postcard survey, and semistructured interviews with festivalgoers, performers, and festival organizers. Findings show that festivalgoers learned through spoken words and visuals of the performances and their embodied/somatic reactions to the performances, self-reflection, collective discourse and reflection, festival design elements, self-learning following the festivals, and from creating a performance and performing. The learning that resulted had significant impacts on festivalgoers including empathy development, therapeutic and healing benefits, a sense of hope, allyship development, and personal transformation. The festivals’ wider societal benefits were found to be increased queer visibility in the communities; the power to shift societal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour; and economic benefits. The study sheds light on the leadership potential of queer cultural activists and artists (artivist-leaders) as it reveals how the festivals’ act as powerful cultural producing sites with individual and social transformation and learning possibilities. Finally, the study’s findings provide evidence that rejects the claim that a new queer social movement exists and is distinct from the traditional gay and lesbian social movement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".