TECHNOLOGIES OF FABULOUS, TRANSMEDIAL DRAG & MINOR DIGITIZATION

This essay is a slightly revised transcript of the opening plenary talk I gave at the 2022 SpokenWeb symposium, “The Sound of Literature in Time,” on Monday, May 16th. In order to accent the live quality of this work, I have kept it in the “talk” form, addressing readers as audience, and maintaining the speculative and malleable quality of sound over the linearization and reification of text. In this sense, this talk exists as a contradiction of terms that both transcribes speech into print – and thus transforms its visual rendering – and works to imbue print with the immediacy of sound. The talk’s measure is the minute, not the page. Temporality creates an imaginary in which “yesterday” was three years ago. Differently phrased, my talk has been curated into a representation, or reversioning, of itself, one that is constantly aware of its latent liveness. Thank you to Klara du Plessis, for her immense patience as I tried to get a readable version of this talk organized, and for her editorial wizardry; to Jason Camlot for the invitation; to Mike O’Driscoll for the Introduction and letting me mess with it; to Michael Nardone and the amodern team for their efforts, especially for adding visual descriptions for all images, which are accessible using a screen-reader, offering us the sound of images on a page; and to everyone with whom I had fabulous conversations during the symposium.

 

Setting the Stage

Michael O’Driscoll Introduces T.L. Cowan

Good morning, and welcome to our first plenary of the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium. My name is Mike O’Driscoll, and I’m a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and a Governing Board Member of the SpokenWeb Project. I’m absolutely thrilled and honoured to provide an introduction to our special guest speaker today, Professor T.L. Cowan. T.L. and I have been friends and colleagues for many, many years now, and somewhere back in the before times I was also their doctoral supervisor. So let me just begin by saying, T.L., that it is a genuine pleasure to have this chance to stand up and say sparkling things about you.

Professor Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a fabulous – in every sense of the word – cabaret and video artist. Their creative-research practice moves with style and panache between page, stage, and screen, including the work of their alter-ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane and the “I Disown You Right Back” campaign. And if you haven’t had a chance to see Trixie do her thing, please do go find her on Vimeo or YouTube… it’ll be worth the visit.

Professor Cowan’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices. This important work finds a place in exhibitions such as those they’ve held at the PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, the Queens Museum in New York City, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto, as well as in a busy program of publication. Professor Cowan is currently working on two monographs, Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, and The Needs of Others: Trauma, Media & Disorder. If you’d like to access some of their most recent scholarly work, you might look to Linda Morra’s 2020 collection, Moving Archives, which contains Professor Cowan’s article titled “Don’t you know that digitization is not enough?” – a piece that has been a guiding light for those of us who aspire to practice what they call “care-full curation.” Professor Cowan’s recent contribution to the Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities & Art History titled “Re-mediating Trans- Feminist and Queer Performance Art” furthers this program of research, which brings ethical and political considerations to the forefront of DH initiatives; as does the 2020 American Quarterly “remix” piece on performance studies and DH at the intersections of work that is brilliantly “anti-colonial, trans-feminist and queer’ing, crip’ing, and anti-racist.”

T.L. also frequently collaborates with their partner in crime, the wonderful Jas Rault who sadly can’t join us today because they’re busy looking after cats and birdwatching during high season. Their research projects such as “Networked Intimate Publics,” digital research environments such as the Cabaret Commons, their collaborative editorial projects, the forthcoming monograph titled Heavy Processing, and their co-direction of the Critical Digital Methods Institute altogether comprise a veritable vortex of activist scholarship and performance that is evidence not only of productive and engaged academic work, but also of a deep and abiding commitment to real-world impact from the vantage of smart and nimble analytic and creative practices.

In keeping with these tendencies, in 2022-23 Professor Cowan will be a faculty fellow of the Queer & Trans Research Lab (QTRL) in Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, initiating a new research project, “Assisted Living in the Life of the Mind: Building Trans- Feminist & Queer Mental Health and Accessibility Networks in the University.”

Professor Cowan’s talk today is titled “Technologies of Fabulous & Minor Digitization: Trans- Feminist & Queer Cabaret Cross-Platform Methods for Online Research Environments.”

And so there you go my rock-star friend, welcome to the stage.

 

Re-Introduction: On Introductions…

Thank you Mike! It is so wonderful to be in this shared space with you!

I want to begin by placing myself: I was raised in a settler town on traditional Anishinaabe territory.¹ The town was also adjacent to (and segregated from) the Wahta Mohawk Nation. During the time I was growing up there, I felt submerged in deep racism, from and within the settler town, towards the Mohawk Nation; I have always known that white settlers are desperate to hold on to what they have stolen, and that anti-Indigenous racism is a collective legitimization strategy. In my adulthood, I have taken the liberty of a great deal of settler mobility across Turtle Island. I have lived in many places in the territory now known as Canada, including Treaty 6 territory on the Prairies, Mic’mac territory on the East Coast, and on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations on the West Coast. I have also lived in what is politically designated as New York City, the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) people. I currently live and work in Toronto/Tkaronto, the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River Nation, who are the current treaty holders.

 

The Divers

In the past week (mid-May 2022), I attended the exhibition A Fable for Tomorrow, a survey of works by lesbian/dyke/queer artist Wendy Coburn, at the Onset Gallery at OCAD University. This exhibition, as well as a few other recent experiences, has shaped the ideas I present today. I begin here with an image of a piece entitled, “The Divers.” In this tiny sculpture Coburn depicts two white- and female-signifying bodied figures diving and frolicking inside a secret swimming hole, which Coburn created inside a fur (presumably Beaver pelt) muff. Coburn offers a double-edged-entendre here. She recreates the Beaver muff, which references the European demand for Beaver pelts in the 17^th, 18^th, and (early) 19^th centuries to make men’s hats as well as “collars, cuffs, muffs and gauntlets” (made from the under-fur of the North American beaver).² Although the predominant fashion craze in Europe was for men’s felted hats, by choosing to make a beaver muff, Coburn is implicating women and women’s fashion in the extractive and extinction economy of the “Fur Trade” that substantiated the territory then known as “New France.” Additionally, and very important for Coburn’s dyke aesthetic and politic, she is also referencing an old joke, Q: What do you call two lesbians in a canoe? A: The Fur Trade, thus both implicating queers in the settler colonial project in Canada and nodding to dykes being the butt of the joke. This sculpture playfully images the secret life of dykes (aka “muff-divers”) while also calling attention to the ways that settler dyke queer life, including a close-to-unanimous shared affinity for “nature” and escapes into “nature,” are complicit in the European settler colonial project of the Nation of Canada, including my own affinity for secret lesbian swimming holes, nature in general, and muff-diving.

My commitments to anti-colonial work in my life as an academic and artist leads me to tangle with the ways that settler academic and artistic cultures (in Canada, for example), overlap with, study, fetishize, instrumentalize, dangerously expose, and extract from queerness (including settler dyke queerness and settler trans- feminist and queer [TFQ] life, culture, politics, aesthetics and so on), in ways that are reminiscent of, and reproduce, colonial ways of knowing. Additionally, the narrative of the successful artistic or academic career and life relies on “author-izing” scholarship and artistic works based on collective queer knowledges. The act of “author-izing” can dangerously re-entrench the troubling myth of the “individual as the basic research unit,” which permits scholars to claim collective knowledge for their own gain. Here, I borrow from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s observation that European colonial-imperialist epistemologies entrench the individual as the “basic social unit”, which violates relational Indigenous epistemologies.³ Thus, here I want to acknowledge that my work here is part of a collective practice. I was happy to accept this invitation both because I am thrilled to share my ideas with you all here today, and because I have to prepare my tenure dossier this summer. The individual scholar is still the basic tenure unit, and I would like the privilege of job security. So here I stand, solo scholar talking about my approach to collective, relational trans- feminist and queer knowledges, excited to be in conversation with you all … and as 49-year-old Assistant Professor Seeking Tenure. ⁴

 

Re-beginning, Queer Coping

Content warning: In the next 5 minutes I’m going to talk about mental illness and other traumatic experiences, and later in the presentation I will be talking about suicide. I do this, I hope, with tenderness and care-fullness, knowing that these experiences are immensely difficult to experience and also to hear and/or read about. But also, I believe and hope, that it can be a relief to hear that someone who is apparently having a “successful” career, is also living in, out, and through the painful, tough, and also exuberant realities that I call Queer Coping.⁵

I re-begin this talk by thinking about the dangers of the academy in the ways that it tries to produce the exemplary individual, the hyper-ableminded individual, and the culture of nothing-but-success.⁶ I’m also going to re-begin this talk by talking about experiences of mental illness, cognitive disorder/disability, and traumatic class-and ideological-transitioning out of a low-income, anti-feminist, anti-intellectual, and homo-hating upbringing, and overwhelming financial debt.

I want to return to the beginning of this presentation and the lovely introduction offered by Professor Michael O’Driscoll. Don’t worry: Mike and I spoke about this briefly over email yesterday, so it is not an ambush!

What is the work of the academic bio? The convention of the genre is to provide a list of accomplishments, successes, accolades, grants, publications, and overall to convey an expression of outstanding productivity (perhaps to justify why the speaker has been invited to speak at all, why anyone might be convinced to listen, and what qualifies them to speak and be listened too). After I emailed Mike my bio this week (and most of what Mike read is from the bio that I provided), I realized that I feel that I need to complicate this public narrative of my life and my career. Yes, everything that is in the bio is true. But pull back the curtain and you’ll see that it is such a partial truth. For example, even though I won a big award for my dissertation and had a book contract and received positive peer reviews for that manuscript, I never managed to publish it. The book I’m trying to finish right now I’ve been working on for well over 10 years. After I passed the qualifying exams during my PhD program, I had such a traumatic reaction to class transitioning and complex childhood PTSD that I couldn’t get out of bed for 6 months. (I watched so much Veronica Mars.) And I have had many of these sick-in-bed times since then. I had a supervisor (the same Professor, Michael O’Driscoll) and a dissertation committee that was supportive and rolled with it when I missed a chapter due date or turned in a chapter draft that was still 100% not-yet-obviously-connected hot takes. This support made it possible for me to write with a freedom to think tangentially, which helped me to understand that my brain doesn’t think linearly, and that pulling ideas together works more like a multi-directional circuit rather than a single track for me.

Being sick and then being able to write a bit and then being sick again has continued to be the intellectual “productivity” pattern in my life. I have adult-diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity (& Hypoactivity) Disorder (ADHD) and in early 2020 I took a 15-week mental health leave to do intense trauma therapy; I have certainly taken many more unofficial mental health leaves throughout my career. When I finished grad school, I was in an astounding amount of financial debt, and let me tell you, my family was not going to pay this back for me, and no, I could not move home to save money. I’ve been through a cycle of having one year where lots of things seem to be going right (winning grants, finishing pieces of writing, feeling more-or-less healthy) offset by several years when almost everything seems to be going wrong (not winning grants, not finishing any writing, feeling more-or-less unhealthy). I’ve had several jobs in the academy, some of them lovely, some of them fancy, and some of them humiliating, demoralizing, and enraging. I’ve had very good luck with friends and collaborators and mentors. But in the past many years now, I have found myself moving from crisis to crisis and grief to grief in my family-of-origin and in my extended chosen queer kin worlds. As we gather here in 2022, we know that it’s been a most difficult few years for so many of us. This difficulty shapes my work, and I believe that the difficult and awesome experiences of your lives equally shape your reception of my bio, and my work. So, I didn’t want to show up with just a regular modern-colonial bio that’s all about how great an individual I am and how much success I’ve had. Before I begin (again), I want to say to anyone in the audience who is struggling – yes, that too is part of this academic and artistic (and trans- feminist and queer) life — I hope that thinking together about “The Sound of Literature in Time” over the next couple of days, might also allow us to think critically about what we expect of ourselves in time, to embrace criptastic time, and what poet and scholar Eli Clare calls “brilliant imperfection.”⁷

 

Fancy Fridays

 

Terms of Enqueerment

Trans- Feminist & Queer (TFQ)

To back up a bit (again) for some terminology: Trans- Feminist and Queer (TFQ) is a framing that Jas Rault and I have been working on for about the past decade as we tried to come up with a shorthand for the cultural, political, intellectual, and erotic communities that would reflect our tacit, explicit, and shifting practices of creating an online “gathering place” for cabaret and other anticipatory and documentary performance media.  What do we mean by TFQ?  At this moment, what we mean is this:

We have developed TFQ as a framework that reflects our locatedness and commitments within our research communities, which also tend to be our social, artistic, and activist communities. For us, TFQ names and points to the coalitional, overlapping, and intersecting ways of making livable lives in an often phobic and divisive world: feminist scenes that prioritize trans lives, politics, and cultures; trans communities that are feminist and are informed by anti-oppression analyses of power; and ways of being collectively, politically queer that are and do both. Usually, TFQ scenes are small local and translocal worlds, under-resourced and (by necessity) over-organizationally-adept, process-oriented, and both intimate and public, often motivated to manifest desire for social and political transformation through rallies, posters, parties, picnics, protests, performances, and processing. The TFQ worlds we are galvanized by are anti-colonial experiments towards accomplice-ship, radical collective efforts to Indigenous and decolonial return, and actively invested in liberation struggles on the bases of race, class, citizenship, disability, gender, and sex.⁹ In our framing of TFQ, we resist utopianism, though we thrill on its horizons, and we move back and forth between the paranoid and the reparative, the optimistic, while acknowledging that many people are living in apocalyptic conditions.¹⁰ During our multiple decades in TFQ worlds, we also know that we (in these worlds) often do harm to each other, even or especially when we try to repair harm. But we are driven by the pleasure of the risk to responsibility, accountability, consent and the messy, heavy process of trying to have fun – fun lives, research questions and projects, shows and performances, boundaries and exercises of sovereignty and autonomy, and always more.¹¹

As we have developed our TFQ framework, we have focused primarily on adjusting normative expectations of research scale and temporality. We ask: what are TFQ priorities and protocols in the context of online collecting, archiving, and exhibiting, and how do we keep these priorities and protocols front-of-mind?  We have tried to resist the distinction between “private” and “public” and rather to think about “small world” and “big world” productions, audiences, knowledges, and to scale our work to and from TFQ “small worlds.” Drawing on my work with Rault, extending it to my research and practice on/in TFQ Cabaret, and in the context of the theme of time of this symposium, “The Sound of Literature in Time,” I want to think about how TFQ Technologies of Fabulous allow us to shift away from chromonormative scholarly temporalities and away from chromonomative research time, which, in addition to the alarming tick tock tick tock of two-articles-per-year-and-a-book-every-three-to-five-years, presumes that a person’s name, gender, sex, health, ability, publicity preferences, and tolerance for risk remain constant throughout a lifetime.¹²)

For example, as Kadji Amin has argued (following Jack Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman), “transgender lives may require mixed strategies — not only healing and an achieved coherence, but also the ability to represent and to inhabit temporal, gendered, and conceptual discontinuities.”¹³ Thinking with TFQ as our critical identity poetics and politics, Rault and I believe that transgender and trans- centering queer and feminist research methods and ethics help us to shift the logics of domination that regulate all research norms. Shifting temporalities and temporal expectations is key to ethical methodologies developed within TFQ research circuits. 

 

TFQ Cabaret

I have been experimenting with definitions of TFQ cabaret for decades now. As I write in my “Cabaret” keyword post on the Cabaret Commons:

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the cabaret form to trans- feminist and queer cultural, sexual, and political worlds since the early 20th century. The cabaret as we understand and practice it here at the Cabaret Commons is, loosely, a live show made up from a variety of short acts, often featuring different performers in each act, and composed of many different forms, thematics and styles of performance or presentation. Cabaret tends to include satirical material, using “the strategy of juxtaposing the humorous and the sober” to bring into serious consideration the critical issues of the day.¹⁴ Cabaret is, to paraphrase Ezra Pound on poetry, the news that stages news. Some other defining features of cabaret as we are practicing it here: it tends to showcase the work of brand new, emerging, and established artists all on the same stage. This is one aspect of what I have called the “shared stage” method of cabaret—bringing together artists at different points in their careers, introducing each to new audiences based on the regular crowd who shows up to see an old favourite (who am I calling old?!) or the gaggle of friends who have never been to a cabaret, pouring in to see their pal’s first time performing drag, or reading their poetry, or singing folk music, dancing burlesque, showing a video, doing shadow puppets, tap dancing, doing stand-up comedy.

TFQ cabaret methods shape our work with the Cabaret Commons.

When we started onlining promotional media and documentary cabaret materials for the Cabaret Commons, we realized that there was something deeply disturbing about moving these materials — which had almost always been intended for small and friend-based intimate local cabaret audiences usually of no more than a few hundred people — to the potentially infinite and potentially unfriendly, phobic and possibly dangerous, trolling and toxic audiences, the unscrupulous actors, of the world wide web (i.e.: the internet). As we onlined materials we became so aware of the internet as an architecture of collapse, we realized that it (and we as researchers invested in creating an online environment gathering these materials for exposure) posed a particular set of risks for TFQ artists, activists, and audiences. 

Thus, we have worked with dozens of collaborators over the past several years to design a different kind of collaboratory, which would be consent- and artist- centered, and which would prioritize a theoretical and practical harm reduction and careful application of TFQ intimacies online and offline. This has led to a couple of theory informed onlining practices.

 

Transmedial Drag

Transmedial Drag is the term I have developed to reference a way of working that uses offline cabaret methods of trans-venue-drag (dragging your gear and your ass from venue to venue, to be seen, heard, felt) to migrate queer nightlife (and day-life) to online platforms. It is a form of hustle.

For example, let’s think about the ways that we have always made shows happen in whatever venues we could get our hands on – bars, bookstores, galleries, basement squats, art studios, fitness studios, church basements, banquet halls, sex toy shops, rooftops, and theatres large and very small, living rooms, community centres, conference centres. Every one of these venues pose challenges to the TFQ cabaret. Sometimes the stage is too small; often there is no stage at all; or the chairs are screwed to the floor so folks can’t mingle, flirt, cruise and gossip; often there are no chairs at all; sometimes the bartenders are homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist, ableist or all of these; often there are no bartenders at all and you have to set up and work your own bar (danger: 5-ounce pours); sometimes the space is moldy, too bright, too dark, or too expensive; often it is wheelchair inaccessible. DIY kings, queens and other queers are accustomed to the challenges of making our shows and parties happen in really any space, any venue.

I understand the drag performance itself as a transmedial practice of moving gestures, looks, materials, and sounds from one body to another; thinking about cabaret methods through the lens of transmedial drag has shaped our design (and perpetual re-designs) of the Cabaret Commons.

 

X^∞-Reception

I propose that X-Reception is a reception practice, ethic, and aesthetic that might stand for and critically remind us of, the possibly infinite trajectories that critically restored and onlined remains and the live performance they index, as they traverse (are traversed) virtual, augmented, realities.¹⁵ I have come up with the excessive, dramatic, and fabulative formulation “X^∞-Reception” to emphasize Beth Coleman’s attention to the multidirectional and multivalent nature of X-reality; or for a theory of reception, the X^∞ attends to the infinite variables of context, intimacy and reception, shift and collapse in the virtual, online dimension, and need to be anticipated and accounted for both in the process of platform design and development and in the responsible maintenance once the platform goes “live.”¹⁶)

 

Minor Digitization

To take seriously the worst-case scenarios brought to us by X^∞-Reception, I think about drag as a method for transmedial and remediation practices, especially in the context of research culture. As Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s observes in The Politics of Mass Digitization, “mass digitization of cultural memory is neither a neutral technical process nor a transposition of the politics of analog cultural heritage to the digital realm on a 1:1 scale,” which means that it “should be approached as an infrapolitical process that brings together a multiplicity of interests hitherto foreign to the realm of cultural memory.”¹⁷ As a set of cabaret research praxes, transmedial drag and X^∞-Reception, might motivate us to push back against the pressures of mass digitization (that is, infinite reproduction without the capacity or nuance for finite consent), and towards minor or minoritized digitization. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari frame “minor literature,” as a literature “which a minority constructs within a major language.”¹⁸ I suggest “minor digitization” as digitization that a minority (or multiple minorities) constructs within the major language and logic of mass digitization. When we consider mass digitization as the dominant cultural and professional language that wills us to make every aspect of our lives, art and research publicly available online, transmedial drag as a method of “minor digitization,” informed by the worst-case-scenarios brought to us by X^∞-Reception, offers an alternative to this pressure. It insists that scholars pose ethical questions and protocols about remediation at the level of context, scale and exposure, and are accountable for the potentially harmful consequences of onlining TFQ cultural heritage as they are released in the often phobic, toxic space of the whole wide world and/of the world wide web.

 

Technologies of Fabulous

What I’m calling “Technologies of Fabulous” are the fables, the anecdotes, and gossip, and the messes that make up the intimacies formed and broken in their relating: the trans- feminist and queer performative orientation to utopia in the face of obvious disaster and impossible networks of survivance that may never make themselves obvious to outsiders, but they are the collective knowledge-making practices, makeshift hustle, and aesthetic exuberances that animate the staged performances in grassroots cabaret (the satirical, political variety show) and related TFQ productions.¹⁹ Technologies of Fabulous might be thought of as applied knowledges that are practiced within, and emerge from, the small-world possibilities created in a cabaret and other minor TFQ spaces. Technologies of Fabulous are also the methods we use to reaccess these site-specific and translocal knowledges once an event has passed; they are the techniques of knowledge production that  make possible the performance or production, and far exceed what can be captured by (a mere) reproduction. In my talk today, I bring you through the ways that I think about building and sustaining trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) cross-platform cabaret methods for online research environments by first thinking through fabulation in the work of Carina Guzmán and Wendy Coburn, and then through the frameworks of “Technologies of Fabulous,” “Transmedial Drag” and “Minor Digitization”. These three methods form the basis of my book, Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, and have formed, and been formed, through the Cabaret Commons, an online research environment that I co-direct with Jas Rault, and co-produce with Managing Editors Stephen Lawson and Carina Guzmán; Web Accessibility Editor, Emily Faubert; and Product Designer, Jermaine Williams.

 

Fabulation

I must re-re-begin with a story:  It is re-told (now many, many gleeful times) with permission from Darrin Hagan (aka Gloria Hole). I first heard this story told on stage by Gloria Hole, the Edmonton Queen, and her drag mother, the late great Halifax high priestess of drag, Lulu LaRude, at the Loud & Queer cabaret in 2002 in Edmonton.²⁰

The story goes like this: When Gloria was just a baby queen (approximately 1983), she and Lulu found themselves offered a gig out in Gibbons – a semi-rural town an hour or so north of Edmonton. They were booked by an agent for a show at a tavern called “Sensations” or “Celebrities” or “Hot Spot” or something both very gay-sounding and very strip-club-sounding. For weeks before, an excited Gloria had told all of her friends that she’d booked a FEATURE gig OUT OF TOWN and just couldn’t stop talking about it. It was to be only her second time in drag. It turns out the place was indeed a strip club. Gloria and Lulu didn’t last long on stage and barely escaped with their lives. They got back in their truck (in Alberta even drag queens drive trucks) and high-tailed it back to (the relative safety of) Edmonton.

Once they were back in the truck, poor young Gloria said to her mentor Lulu, “Oh Lulu what are we going to tell everyone? I’m so ashamed.”

Wise Lulu turned to Gloria and said, “Have I taught you nothing? We’re going to tell them it was FABULOUS.”

This story is foundational to my thinking about Technologies of Fabulous. In many cases, they are that which is said only within the small world possibilities created in a pick-up truck after a “fabulously” failed/exhilarating cabaret experiment. Technologies of Fabulous make possible the stories we tell about our social, sexual, staged and unstaged experiments at house parties, rallies, protests, and other TFQ spaces. They are techniques of knowledge production that go well beyond what can be captured by a mere reproduction.

The risk of being fabulous, as perhaps every drag queen knows, is the risk of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, disciplined by a life-threatening set of rules that you’re not even playing by. As Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel note about “the fabular” in their introduction to the introduction to their 2016 special issue of GLQ, “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies”:

we have opted for the fabular because it can be thought of as the form through which one imagines a better or perhaps just a good enough analytic. Fables underscore peculiar commonalities and repetitions of belief and orient routinized habits of analysis while attending to the generation of value/capital that is implicit in both. [Whereas] translation (especially in embodied elsewheres) could inadvertently slide into literalization, punctiliousness, or conversion, mislaying in the process the fecundity that the fabular can lug along.²¹

After over two decades of performing in, curating, and thinking through the study, exhibiting, and archiving of TFQ cabaret and its manifold expressive cultures, I propose that we think of the fabular as a technique or technology that makes possible the practice of creating and holding what is necessarily generative for ourselves and those who listen to our stories in the face of obvious disaster.²² With this broad definition, the framework of “Technologies of Fabulous” might apply even beyond TFQ scenes. However, rather than being a totalizing/“total” theory, I offer it as a “good enough” analytic, a “good enough” assemblage. I propose that this is an analytic and framework we learn from TFQ cabaret ways of working: we work “when we can, how we can, where we can.”²³ I think with Alexander Weheliye who, in Habeas Viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human, uses “technology” “in the broadest sense as the application of knowledge to the practical aims of human life or to changing and manipulating the human environment.”²⁴ Thus, Technologies of Fabulous may be understood as applying knowledges gleaned from TFQ experiments of living the practical and impractical aims of TFQ life. Technologies of Fabulous are invented through attempts to change or manipulate the human environment within which we find ourselves and attempt to live. Technologies of Fabulous might be understood, in the broadest sense, as ways of operating in insecurity, precarity, trauma, poverty, danger and risk, and making the excessive most of what we can scratch together, even, and especially if that excessive most is very small scale and regularly make-believe. Technologies of Fabulous displace the centrality of the modern-colonial, settler-colonial, white supremacist, racial/racist capitalist myths of “operating securely”;²⁵ to operate securely (without the need for fabulation) is to disavow the situation that produces these massive inequities in our worlds. As Tavia Nyong’o writes of fabulation: “The overriding of our rational brain is key to how fabulation, as an instinct for the virtual, unlocks and unleashes novelty in an otherwise deadlocked symbolic order.”²⁶ As an operating principle for Technologies of Fabulous, I propose that we first identify and seize upon that symbolic order in which we are deadlocked; and then we begin the cabaret work of fabulating – unlocking – new sets of realities.

 

Stor(y)ing mi desmadre

I want to move on now to talk about the work of my collaborator and colleague and (at the time) doctoral student Dr. Carina (Islandia) Guzmán. I’ll take the liberty of drawing heavily from an essay Guzmán published on the Cabaret Commons Critical Practice (CCCP), to draw your attention to Guzmán’s archival theory of “stor(y)ing mi desmadre” [loosely translated, “storing/storying my mess”]:

What survives survives because someone valued it enough to make space for it in that corner of their room, suitcase or hard drive where they keep these things. These are the first two of three steps in a process I call “stor(y)ing mi desmadre.” First, a macha [a queer, a dyke, lesbian, a friend of queers, dykes, lesbians] keeps a physical or digital object so that one of the few records of a self-organized nightlife event does not disappear into oblivion. Secondly, they integrate it into that mess of ephemera which, over the years, and thanks to their care, becomes a collection. […] This leads to the third and final step in the process of stor(y)ing, in which the caregiver of mi desmadre makes it available for consultation and in posterity because they know it is the only source for the history it tells.²⁷

Thus, the ongoing decision to store (and of storing) the materials, is an act of fabulation, keeping and making it possible to re-tell the stories of the materials, stor(y)ing them. 

The loose translation of mi desmadre as “my mess” is inadequate. As Guzmán explains:

The Mexican Spanish phrase mi desmadre is perfect to refer to the collection that results from valuing, appraising, and conserving queer nightlife ephemera that is otherwise considered trash. Desmadre is a noun that literally means “de-mother,” and is used to refer to a mess or a messy situation. The phrase mi desmadre, holds together the two (allegedly) antagonistic concepts of structure and chaos. Mi means “my;” if something is mine, it implies that thing (material or abstract) belongs to me or that I created it, and, therefore, it has been structured by my mind, I understand how it works. It is not just a desmadre, it’s mi desmadre. So then, if a desmadre is mine and I understand it, it is only considered a mess of trash because it exists in a world-system that cannot value its contents and cannot know how my feminized, dissident and marginalized experience of nightlife structures it.

Guzmán proposes that the stor(y)ing outlines a trajectory of world-making and world-knowing that at once places long-term value on “feminized, dissident and marginalized experience[s] [of] nightlife” and implies a futurity and utopian dimension that is activated when these objects of nightlife ephemera are saved, thus conferring onto them the status of evidence and therefore of records: archivable historical sources to be conserved in the turmoil of mi desmadre, from which they materialised in the first place. For me, Guzmán’s theory of ‘stor(y)ing mi desmadre’ points to and exemplifies a beautiful Technology of Fabulous, which clearly emerges from the applied knowledges and transformations of human life that are manifested by “macha” trans- feminist and queer nightlife in the Latinx Americas: it is theory-as-story-as-technology, offering an account of how we know (from) and make our messes and our messiness and how we store these stories.

Returning to our Fancy Fridays exhibit in the context of Guzmán’s theory and practice of “stor(y)ing mi desmadre,” it strikes me that Jas and I were putting this theory into practice with these domestic portraits: With flair, we staged the mess of depression, isolation, and misery of the pandemic in tension with the survival strategy of imagining/staging ourselves within a mysterious fabulousness (just out-of-reach) and simultaneously being always in the same spot in the same room, always wearing the same slippers, always with the same dirty cat dishes in the corner of the room. In this series, we were trying to amuse ourselves and entertain each other and our friends with these portraits while also thinking with Guzmán (we were the co-supervisors of her doctoral program of research) around “hold[ing] together the two (allegedly) antagonistic concepts of structure and chaos” by imposing the weekly/weakly structure of a pandemic tableau vivant (staying put, still living), one of the chaotic agitated stillness of our pandemic homelife.

 

A Fable for Tomorrow

[Head’s up: this is the part of the talk when I talk about suicide.]

Wendy Coburn (1963—2015) was a queer, dyke, lesbian artist, professor, video-maker, and activist whose aliveness was as an artist, audience member, beloved difficult person, raconteur, and brilliant friend. Her life ended when she killed herself in 2015. In May 2022, I attended the closing reception of Fable for Tomorrow: A Survey of Works by Wendy Coburn. I must say I was overcome by Coburn’s delicacy, the devastating complexity of humour, and the love, rage, sadness, despondency, anxiety, and grief in the work. I was taken aback, aside, asunder, by her deeply felt and finely-formed desire for accountability and fabulous life-and-death human and more-than-human encounters with and within the settler queer experience (and the disturbing settler queer project) in (the territories known as) Canada. As curators, Andrea Fatona and Caroline Seck Langill note in their exhibition essay: Fable for Tomorrow “asks us to radically think and act upon the type of world/ecology we desire in the now and to re-imagine possible futures.”²⁸ I was overcome with such a renewed sense of loss that Wendy was no longer here, that she was no longer making beautiful work; but also, with the fabulousness/fableness of the stories she crafted during her life and which she left for us and with us.

Wendy was a new friend to me when she died; I had known her only about 5 years and we had only lived in the same city for one of those years. However, she touched me, as she touched so many; and she was very important to very many people who are very important to me and many others. I want to think through Technologies of Fabulous here with some of Coburn’s work in this exhibit.

I begin with a tiny sculpture entitled Leda and the Beaver (2000). Here, Coburn is calling on “Leda and the Swan,” the ancient Greek myth that tells a story of the God Zeus who turns himself into a swan and rapes Leda, a Spartan queen. The myth has been depicted in many sculptures and paintings over the past two and a half millennia. For her contribution, Coburn creates an alternate myth; rather than reproducing the mythological narrative device of sexual violence, she converts it, with the figure of Leda as the “top” of her sexual experience with a Beaver (who looks relaxed and having a grand time), the mythical mascot of Canada (returning to The Divers and the centrality of the hunting of beavers and the ‘fur trade’ in the first two centuries of European “contact” on the territories now known as Canada). Paired with the equally tiny sculpture, Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver (2000), which depicts a beaver “eating (out)” a female figure (in both of these sculpture this figure is modeled on Coburn’s own body, thus implicating her in this myth-making and re-making/remodeling), these sculptures work together to render ridiculous the idea of Canada as a mythological nation (or the myths of/which instantiate Canada as a nation).²⁹ Furthermore, when experienced in spatial conversation with “Untitled,” a sculpture of a swan’s broken neck, displayed across the exhibit, I felt strongly Coburn’s satisfaction in revenge against both sexual violence as a narrative apparatus and large-scale myths (myths, writ large), refusing the conventional mythologies of both the raping swan and the nationalist beaver. Using finely etched sculptural materials, juxtaposition, and tongue-in-cheek (and tongue-in-other-places, ahem) storytelling, she offers a new queer, feminist, anti-imperialist set of old fables and imagery.

The scale of these sculptures is central to my reading of this assemblage. Both Leda and the Beaver and Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver are tiny and appear delicate and fragile. However, the materials (urethane and bronze, respectively) are solid and draw our attention to the details they hold, their contexts, and the purpose of thinking and creating at a small scale, even about big ideas and big problems (like sexual violence and imperialist and settler-colonial nation-building). Coburn’s swan sculpture is significantly bigger than Leda and the Beaver and Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver. Coburn (and the curators) puts to use the techniques of her artistic practice to transform old stories, inform new stories, and enable exhibit visitors to feel these knowledges (including jokes as applied knowledges for better or for worse) not only through the fables and the myths that she is working with, on, and against, but also through a political aesthetics of scale.

Just as Coburn was constantly playing with this dyke joke of “eating beaver,” of being a “muff diver,” she was also making  a great deal of work that provoked us to be with the complicities of extractive queer settler coloniality, including her back-handed references to back-to-the land dykes going out to the country and grabbing up private property. I felt very intensely that these miniatures, in the delicacy of Coburn’s craft and skill, were also an attempt to put on display the fragility of these ideas, especially within lesbian, dyke and queer worlds, while using an inversely small scale to play with us, asking us to stay with the joke.

The final piece from the Fable for Tomorrow exhibit that I am thinking about here is Coburn’s U-Haul Suite. The joke goes like this. Q: What do lesbians do on a second date? A: Rent a U-Haul and move in together.

I’m not sure if the joke of Lesbian Uhauling (or Lesbian Uhaul Syndrome) still applies for younger generations, but certainly it works in my Gen-X context. Coburn’s photo series portrays U-Haul containers, trailers, and trucks of different shapes and sizes driving through epic meteorological phenomena: a lightning strike, a rainstorm, a tornado, Northern Lights, a starry sky, a rainbow. Here, it strikes me that she is taking the myth/joke (for Coburn they go hand-in-hand) of the Lesbian U-Haul Syndrome and framing it within a big-sky magnitude. Instead of it just being a flat knock-knock joke, she uses painterly photographic digital technologies to re-scale the U-Haul into a fabulous(ly) moving container of monumental proportions and to tell queer, dyke, lesbian stories in their many dimensions.

I have been working on the idea of Technologies of Fabulous for over 10 years, but it was only after my encounter with the exhibition of Coburn’s work, that I finally was able to articulate to myself the importance of the political aesthetics of scale. Experiencing these pieces and the full survey in the Fable for Tomorrow show, Coburn and her work helped me to focus my ideas for this talk, especially with regards to the notion that perhaps the most critical aspect of Technologies of Fabulous is scaling our stories in a complex and multi-dimensional way.

 

The Cabaret Commons

The Cabaret Commons is an online research environment that Jas Rault and I conceptualized around 2010. In the first 7 years of the project, we created two unpublished proofs-of-concept, which we used to experiment with many collaborators. The first online version in 2018 was on a WordPress site, and in 2022 we re-launched the project to differentiate between the Cabaret Commons Critical Practice (CCCP) – a venue for publishing multimedia formats, reviews, responses, rants, and processes on everything to do with translocal grassroots cabaret and their worlds; and the Cabaret Commons Exhibition Place (CCXP) – a venue for digital exhibitions of works created by translocal grassroots and activist cabaret artists, audiences, and researchers.

 

Swaggering Resonance

The first extensive exhibit produced for the CCXP was Swaggering Resonance in Le Boudoir 1994-2006. In collaboration with curators Miriam Ginestier and Itzayana (Itza) Gutiérrez Arillo, as well as Managing Editor, Stephen Lawson and Exhibitions Coordinator, Nelanthi Hewa, we worked for over two years to bring together the goals and ambitions of the curators with the consent-centred, small-scale methodological and ethical protocols that we had developed for the Cabaret Commons. In particular, the balancing act in creating this exhibition held in tension the various ways we each imagined what it would look like and feel like to use digital onlining technologies to care for the fabulous, complicated, multidimensional and multi-temporal materials and memories of the long-standing cabaret, Le Boudoir. This exhibit has been critical for clarifying our renewed commitment to supporting exhibits in which TFQ artists, audiences, activists and researchers can celebrate our works and worlds while also contending with the harms of our pasts and ongoing present and futures:

 

Swaggering Resonance in Le Boudoir 1994-2006: Curatorial Statement

Swaggering Resonance frames Le Boudoir, a sexy lesbian soirée which ran annually for 13 years in Montreal. Le Boudoir was a long evening of entertainment that took place primarily at the Art Déco venue Le Lion d’Or. It featured stage performances, carnivalesque off-stage activities including a tattoo booth, tarot readings and a peepshow, and closed with a dance party. It was a fancy dress soirée where crossdressing was abundant, and “gentlemen” could only attend if they were escorted by “ladies.”

Swaggering Resonance is curated by Miriam Ginestier, who produced Le Boudoir, and Itzayana (Itza) Gutiérrez Arillo, who encountered the event in 2018 while archiving the materials left behind. As co-curators, we come from radically divergent vantage points, and have differently wired brains, community and writing practices. We converged in centering conversational methods where we and others have been able to improvise, trust, gently push and strategize about words in a space of cross-generational friction.

The exhibit presents a selection (16 out of 57 distinct collectible images) of the covers of double-sided promotional flyers, enriched with testimonial texture by way of written and oral memories collected in the Spring of 2020. Flyers and memories have been placed in two exhibit areas: Queer Nostalgia and Haunting Objects. Finally, this exhibit unfolds in The Archive, a zone where paper-based sources, conversations and digitized remnants are available for consultation.

When Miriam showed Itza Le Boudoir printed ephemera and some of her memories, ideas and remnants of the event, they held “swaggering resonance” for Itza. The transmission involved some travelling from far away since, at the time of the first event, Itza was becoming a teenager in Mexico. For Miriam and many of those who experienced Le Boudoir in Montreal, the event holds a bounty of queer nostalgia, invoking their young adulthood at the turn of the millennium.

Le Boudoir had roughly two periods: 1994-2001, when the stage show featured a dozen cabaret acts; and 2002-2006, when a 40-minute vaudeville play was added to the mix. During this second period, audiences grew from 475 to 633 and the budget went from $5,000 to $20,000. At this stage, the event partnered with Out Productions and received funding from Imperial Tobacco. After 11 editions, Le Boudoir outgrew Le Lion D’Or and moved to Théâtre Corona in 2005, and Le National in 2006. Its expansion – and the additional work this entailed – contributed to its demise. 

In this curatorial encounter, we tenderly hold printed promotional materials from both periods, and the visitor will be able to perceive Le Boudoir’s transformations of the flyer contours in terms of colour, resolution, paper quality and contact info (telephone number, email, website). The protagonists of the advertising are mostly unknown and speculatively queer women from Belle Époque postcards to roaring twenties portraits. Our intention is to honour them and to highlight Le Boudoir’s allure while addressing its haunting dimensions.³⁰

The design for Swaggering Resonance reflects the collaboration and compromise between the speculative and the pragmatic, and between many different humans, digital technological affordances and limitations, and different priorities and ambitions for the exhibit.

One of the design features of every Cabaret Commons exhibit is the “threshold page”: when you navigate to the exhibit from the CCXP catalogue page, you encounter an additional page that stops you from directly entering, and through which you enter the exhibit. This threshold page is meant to signal that sense of when you are looking for a queer cabaret, you don’t just walk in there off the street; rather, you have to put some time in and think through how to find it and what you’re going into. 

The Swaggering Resonance home and menu page is designed so that the image (of a woman looking seductively at the camera) is obscured by shadow; only parts of the image are visible at one time, depending on where the cursor is on the page. With this design feature, we are trying to produce, again, the sense that not everything is always available; of course, it also reflects the temptation and tease-aesthetics of burlesque, a critical cabaret performance form.

The Cabaret Commons Exhibition Place is not an archive; rather, it is a place where we make exhibitions based on archival collections as well as original artistic materials. In their curatorial process, Ginestier and Gutiérrez Arillo selected materials from Le Boudoir archive that Ginestier had been collecting since the first year of the soirée and that Gutiérrez first encountered more than twenty years after the first iteration of Le Boudoir. They brought together these different perspectives and experiences with and of the materials to engage in an intersectional and cross-generational conversation about the racialized and orientalizing visual imagery that was used to promote Le Boudoir over the years. I think of the Technologies of Fabulous that the curators put into practice to design an exhibit that could critically interrogate the celebratory-ness of Le Boudoir while simultaneously untangling and being accountable to some of the very white-centric and colonial gaze/gays visual imagery that was reproduced in service of creating a nostalgic feel for the annual events.

For example, in the “Dialoguing Across” statement, Miriam and Itza explain how they encountered these materials across time and situatedness. Itza wrote about “Haunting Objects,” about being a queer of colour encountering these postcards that Miriam had used to promote Le Boudoir and feeling “hurt in the gut” by them. This leads to a conversation with Miriam about becoming accountable for the ways that these images were instrumentalized; the archive, thus, is exhibited in shadows, concealing/revealing both what was, and its contemporary critical interpretation. 

In “The Archive” pages of the exhibit, shadow/blocking/redaction is also used, as materials displayed have been edited to remove the names of people who have not given consent for their names to be made public (and for the purposes of the Cabaret Commons, we only publish names and images of people who have responded with Yes. We do not publish names and images of people who have not responded to queries, are not reachable or who have said no, maybe, or anything other than yes. Further to this, a Cabaret Commons Yes is retractable). The archival materials include scans of the paper materials (promotional flyers, programs, and stage-managing materials including “Things that need doing” and timesheet/set lists.) With permission from the people who participated in audio interviews and written interviews through surveys we made exhibit-specific materials to include audiences and performers from across the years of Le Boudoir. This process was intensely resource-heavy because of the transcription, permissions, editing, re-permissions, and translation of materials. We did not include in the exhibit performance videos and photographs because we just did not have the capacity to be in touch with every single person in every single video or performance image. 

 

Conclusion: The Sound of Performance Materials Online, in Time

I want to conclude by thinking about how TFQ cabaret methods might help us in thinking about the theme of this symposium, “The Sound of Literature in Time”? When Jas and I started onlining materials for the Cabaret Commons, we realized that there was something deeply disturbing about moving these materials – which had almost always been intended for small and friend-based intimate local audiences usually of no more than a few hundred people – to the infinite and potentially trolling or toxic internet, giving access to these materials to all the human and more-than-human actors, most of whom trans- feminist and queer people need to avoid in their everyday and everynight lives. For this reason we developed a set of theories that shape our critical applied apparati and that are informed by our harm-reduction commitment to digital research practices. Technologies of Fabulous, including transmedial drag, X^∞-reception, and minor digitization, are informed by TFQ scholarship and protocols, and practice-sharing about online research environments; they are also deeply informed by the sculptural intimacies, analog aesthetics, and dimensional praxes of scaling of artists like Wendy Coburn. Cabaret is primarily a time-bound form from which time-extending materials are created. When we build online digital research environments, the materials we collect, upload, and distribute are not manifestations of the performance and do not engender the study of the time-bound performance, but of the site-specific remains. Thus, at the Cabaret Commons, we work to foreground the site-specificity of the collections of these remains; in the same way that TFQ cabaret happens, and is only possible, in a particular venue, on a particular stage, at a particular time, so too do (and so are) the materials we collect for our research purposes.

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1. Karyn Recollet and Jon Johnson “‘Why Do You Need to Know That?’ Slipstream Movements and Mapping ‘Otherwise’ in Tkaronto,” Journal of Public Pedagogies, no. 4 (2019): 177–90. ↩

2. “The Beaver and Other Pelts,” in Pursuit of Adventure: The Fur Trade in Canada and the North West Company (2001). McGill University.  https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/nwc/. ↩

3. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, (London: Zed Books, 2012), 51. ↩

4. Reader, in 2024 I got tenure. ↩

5. Queer Coping was an idea I had for a collaborative video project about religiously-based homophobia in families. I made a video called “I Disown You Right Back” after my parents disowned me (again) when my partner and I got gay married (for healthcare after I broke my collarbone 2 months after we moved to the US and I didn’t have healthcare yet but they did). I never got the project underway, but I still might. However, my friend Zab Hobart made this lovely postcard, which was as far as I got with that plan. ↩

6. For my “and-also”-Geyser hotspots-extraordinary-divergent-convergent-tangential-disordered way of thinking, a single beginning is never enough. My ideas come from many unsubduable hotspots: Geyser thinking. And, for more on the ‘difficulties of being begun’ when creating online research environments, see my article with Jas Rault: T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault, “Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives,” in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 2 (2018): 121–42. ↩

7. “Criptastic” is a well-loved framing for the ways that disability offers fantastic new possibilities and ways of working. Following the work of Melanie Yerbeau, Aimi Hamraie, and Kelly Fritsch in their “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” “[c]riptastic hacking highlights crip technoscience as a field of relations, knowledges, and practices that enables the flourishing of crip ways of producing and engaging the material world.” As Emily Hutcheon put it, “I no longer use the terms “disability” or “disabled” when referring to myself or others. Instead, I use other descriptors if I have to, like: a group with diverse abilities. Someone with a diverse ability who might be atypically–bodied. I might also be criptastic.” Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–33; Emily Hutcheon, “A Note on Being Ability–Different, Atypically–Bodied… Criptastic?,” Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics 3, no. 3 (2013): 198. Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). ↩

8. Fancy Fridays Visual descriptions by Emily “Flare” Faubert. Fig. 5)  Fancy Friday #5 – April 24, 2020 Fatigued Friday Lunch Hour Edition. The feeling of rainy weather and dead ground, Jas and T.L. have captured melancholy late April. The two are seated, leaning into each other, wearing soft flannel housecoats over their cozy clothes and slippers. T.L. stares off forlornly, wearing a short black wig with bangs, perhaps wondering “when will this pandemic end?” The two hold beers, and a family-sized bag of lightly salted Lays chips to share between them. Fig. 6) Fancy Fridays Extra – May 22, 2020 Fantasy vs. Reality Long Weekend Writing Deadline Edition. While it’s a sunny day, deadlines loom, so while the two work, they’ve set up their chairs by an indoor campfire constructed from a salt lamp and stones. On their lawn chairs sit piles of books topped with hats and sunglasses; black and white on Jas’s chair, bright colours on TL’s, their respective slippers and drinks posed as if they were there, sharing stories over the crackling fire. The weekly staging elements are included: the piano, the rubber tree plant, the slippers and various household items as well as the unframed print of Peter Hujar’s “David Brintzenhofe in Drag” (1982). Fig. 7) Fancy Friday #9 – October 30, 2020 Necro Whiteness Edition In the spookiest award show, Jas and TL have won and graced the stage in their finest award wear: all black, Jas with a sash of caution tape; TL with a dried bouquet of roses. Their sheet masks sag off their faces and a torn cat toy sits by their slippered feet. To their left sits the cat-shaped awards: a pink wine bottle and a wooden sculpture. A pale, rotten-looking pumpkin sits on the surface next to them, reminding us that Halloween is only a day away. Fig. 8) Fancy Friday #11 December 25, 2020
   Twas the night before christmas, and down in the kitchen
   T.L. and Jas stand, their hair accessories bitchin’
   Surrounded by tinsel, pinecones, and sparklers;
   Our two heroes stand dressed in dark colours;
   Jas is adorned with a disco ball
   A happy holiday to one and to all.
   In a festive scene, Jas and T.L. stand surrounded by seasonal stockings, bows, and pinecone arrangements. Jas is dressed in a black shirt, pants, socks, and sliders; a disco ball hanging from a thick red ribbon looped around their neck, and they hand T.L. a lit sparkler. TL accepts the sparkler, a floor-length tinsel scarf draped across their front and looped under a slipper.
   Over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jas Rault and I co-created a series of domestic portraits, under the title “Fancy Fridays.” This project was a version of “Queer Coping” in this devastating isolation of the pandemic. We used cabaret methods of making do and making a mess to fabulate improbable and hilarious situations out of the dreary, lonely, and intensely difficult circumstances. In composing these portraits, we put to use Technologies of Fabulous to stage tableaux of queer coping that symbolized both the difficulty we were in and the flare that we were trying out as a coping tactic. Ok, end of re-introduction. ↩

9. Rudy, “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex,” Indigenous Action Media, May 4, 2014, https://www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex/. In particular: “An accomplice as academic would seek ways to leverage resources and material support and/or betray their institution to further liberation struggles. An intellectual accomplice would strategize with, not for, and not be afraid to pick up a hammer.” Jas and I have Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” on our minds when we gesture to Indigeneity and returns: “Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks.” Land and resource theft is central to ongoing settler colonialism, and in this context, decolonization means “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 3-21. ↩

10. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–52; Patricia Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); T.L. Cowan, “Transfeminist Kill/Joys: Rage, Love, and Reparative Performance,” in Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (2014): 501–16; and Jasmine Rault, “‘Ridiculizing’ Power: Relajo and the Affects of Queer Activism in Mexico,” in The Scholar & Feminist Online 14, no. 2 (2017), https://sfonline.barnard.edu/ridiculizing-power-relajo-and-the-affects-of-queer-activism-in-mexico/. ↩

11. This is drawn directly from our co-authored book, Heavy Processing (Punctum Books, 2024). ↩

12. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, (Duke University Press Books, 2010. ↩

13. Kadji Amin, “Temporality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014), 220. ↩

14. Laura G. Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 10. ↩

15. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). ↩

16. B. Coleman, Hello Avatar : Rise of the Networked Generation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. ↩

17. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, The Politics of Mass Digitization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 5. ↩

18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Chicago: U of Minnesota Press, 1986. ↩

19. As I’m reading it, I realize I need to point out that that last line, “utopia in the face of obvious disaster and impossible networks of survivance” and certainly many turns of phrase and conceptual arrangements in this talk are written by and emerge from the brain of Jas Rault, my long-time collaborator, co-writer, and partner. We write together so often that our words and ideas kind of go in and out of each other’s pieces; each thing we write together and solo are always more-or-less composites of our conversations and co-creations since 2009. Anyway, I want to indicate that I know for sure that that excellent line has Jas written all over it.  ↩

20. Darrin Hagan, Edmonton Queen: Not a Riverboat Story (Edmonton: Brindle & Glass, 2007). ↩

21. Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (March 2016): 154. ↩

22. T. L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault, “Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no 2 (2018): 121–42. ↩

23. T. L. Cowan, “Insubordinate, Indiscrete, Interdisciplinary: Cabaret Methods, Adjunct Methods, and Technologies of Fabulous,” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 43, no. 1 (2018):  95–98. ↩

24. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Cambridge: Duke University Press, 2014), 12. ↩

25. I don’t remember if this is a phrase I borrowed from someone I read, or if I came to it in the context of these ideas. How do we footnote forgetting? ↩

26. Tavia Nyong’o, “Wildness: A Fabulation,” S&F Online 12, no. 1–2 (Fall-Spring 2014), http://sfonline.barnard.edu/activism-and-the-academy/wildness-a-fabulation/. ↩

27. See also, Guzmán’s dissertation: Carina Guzmán, “Stor(y)ing Mi Desmadre: Trans- Feminist and Queer Community Archival and Digital Custodial Praxes in Latin America” University of Toronto. (PhD diss.). ↩

28. Andrea Fatona and Caroline Seck Langill, Fable for Tomorrow: A Survey of Works by Wendy Coburn, wxh. cat. (Toronto: Onsite Gallery, 2022), 7. ↩

29. For a sustained and truly fabulous reading of Spirit of Canada Eating Beaver, see Margot Francis, Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary (UBC Press, 2011). ↩

30. Miriam Ginesetier and Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo, Swaggering Resonance in Le Boudoir 1994-2006, Cabaret Commons Exhibition Place,2022, digital exhibition, https://cabaretcommons.org/swaggering-resonance/. ↩

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Article: Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 

Article issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.