This special issue on contemporary performance proposes “trans” as method and as a social practice rather than as an immutable identity category that stands in opposition to more established ones such as cis-gender men or cisgender women. We ask new questions about Shakespearean performance: How might the meanings of the plays change if we…[Read more]

Gender is a set of interpersonal relationships and social practices that evolve in the presence of other people , in social spaces, and over time. My theory of trans lens corrects the institutionalized cis-sexism that assumes the cis status of even those characters with fluid gender practices. It does so by questioning the purported neutrality of…[Read more]

This interview with Dr. Mary Ann Saunders, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, offers a new interpretation of Julie Taymor’s 2010 film The Tempest. Bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists’ works, Saunders proposes a new interpretation of Ariel, as performed by Ben Whishaw, as a trans woman who is “both beautiful…[Read more]

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]

This is the proposal for ‘Reading Materials: Pots, Plaster, Poetry, and the Press, 1766-1861’, a (putative) panel for MLA 2024. Individual paper abstracts and other materials will follow.

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]

Tracing the collaboration between Dylan and Scorsese from the 1960s on to the Netflix original ‘The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese’ (2019), this article argues that the mutual respect of the two artists rests on a shared contestation of borders between fact and fiction. In the spirit of romanticism, both Dylan and…[Read more]