ABSTRACT
In some senses, the entire book pivots around this chapter, which marks the apotheosis of the suturing together of ideas about and identifications connected to queer and ideas about and examples of performative cultural expressions in 1990s US academic discourses and practices, including the influential 1991 film Paris is Burning and the early 1990s scholarship of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick definitively laying out the interconnection between queer and the performative. While documenting this dominant discourse, the chapter insistently puts pressure on it. It does so in three ways: 1) by introducing critiques emerging from within the US Black feminist, Latinx, and other previously marginalized intellectual and artistic communities—the work of performance studies scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz and E. Patrick Johnson is exemplary of this burgeoning critical discourse; and, leading to the final two chapters, 2) by foregrounding the rise of visible transgender discourses, cultural forms, and open identifications, particularly in US popular culture and performance art; 3) by introducing decolonial studies pointing to the role of early modern colonial encounters in establishing European-based cultural beliefs about gender and sexuality.
