Queer and classed: Intersectional queer performance in the liminal space between working- and middle-class worlds

This article explores the methodologies that queer and working-class artists utilize in performance making and spaces to represent an intersectional working class. I begin by discussing my own experience as a queer and working-class student navigating the middle-class space of the university and theatre scenes to argue that being in the liminal space, supposedly between classes, offers insight into alternative class representations. The article then offers an overview of the ways in which queer subjects and working-class subjects are currently represented in mainstream theatre practices, arguing that realism has framed LGBTQ+ lives within heteronormativity and working-class lives as deficit. I survey how queer performance practices already offer a counterpoint to realism, but that queer theory sometimes risks the presumption of a male, white and middle-class subject which problematizes the use of these theories when analysing or creating work for multiply marginalized artists. I then look to Black feminism and Queer of Colour Critique as a way to seek intersectional perspectives on working-class subjectivity with a political aim of liberation. In particular, I look to the work of Audre Lorde and José Esteban Muñoz as a blueprint for how disidentificatory performance by queer and working-class artists can establish coalitions or counterpublics that seek collectivity in the incommensurable. I finish by applying this blueprint to the work of Travis Alabanza – showing how their journey from queer club and cabaret performance to the mainstream space of the Royal Court, as exemplified by their plays Burgerz and Sound of the Underground , is a navigation of the individual and collective.