This interview with Terri Power, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, focuses on the representations of trans masculinity in Power’s play Drag King Richard III. For nearly two decades Power has been at the forefront of trans and queer representation in performances of Shakespeare. Weaving a personal story of the 1990s with Shakespeare’s early modern d…[Read more]

This interview with King Sammy Silver, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin and Terri Power, explores drag as a stage practice. A London-based actor and YouTube personality, he represents a new generation of trans artists. He has worked with Power on multiple Shakespeare productions at Bath Spa University in the UK and elsewhere, and has been…[Read more]

This interview with non-binary actor Jess Chanliau, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, explores genderplay onstage. A bilingual actor, Chanliau has played Viola, “an intrinsically trans character” in Twelfth Night and a queer Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. They spoke candidly on their experience of either being toke-nized or being cast frequently as…[Read more]

Cross-gender roles and performances permeate many of Shakespeare’s plays. This special issue on contemporary transgender performance of Shakespeare was published by the open-access journal dedicated to Shakespeare and appropriation, Borrowers and Lenders, and edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. It contains research articles and interviews of actors. S…[Read more]

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Shakespeare’s Sonnets challenge the binaries between gender and between the vernacular and the literary. Translators take up this challenge and turn it into an opportunity for humanist interpretations of literature, as in the case of Taiwanese essayist Liang Shiqiu’s (1903–1987) translation. Widely known in the Sin…[Read more]

Although the systematic eviction of Palestinians from their homeland has been recorded at length since the establishment of the state of Israel in 948, the documentation has namely concerned itself with urban centers or villages. Expulsion and removal of marginalized communities, namely the Bedouins’, from their ancestral encampments or homes h…[Read more]

This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba’s archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of…[Read more]

This chapter argues that cultural appropriation can be an exploitative act but need not be; it all depends on what users do with Shakespeare. Due to the unequal status of the parties engaged in appropriative exchange, some appropriations deploy Shakespeare to protect conventional power structures. Appropriations are rarely negotiated on a level…[Read more]

Collaborative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we…[Read more]

Literary translations work with, rather than out of, the space between languages. Translations evolve not only across linguistic and cultural borders but also across time. It is notable that Shakespeare’s own play texts feature translational properties that can be amplified in translation. This translingual property makes Shakespeare’s text inh…[Read more]

This website provides contextual information and interpretations of the novel Texaco by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau. It was started in spring 2022 as a collaborative project by students in the Honors Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in conjunction with the course Honors 200-008: Caribbean Crucible of Globalization…[Read more]