A Diversity of Tactics

I am a writer, performer, activist and professor currently living in New York City. My artistic, activist and academic work are mutually informing extensions of each other. My research and teaching are importantly influenced by the cultural and political scenes that I inhabit; my artistic productions are invested in an odd-ball and fleshy approach to the theories of cultural expression I take up in my academic productions; and all of this work is shaped by my overarching belief that social justice for all is an achievable goal.

As an artist, I got my start in the booming (largely feminist) spoken word scene of Vancouver in the late 1990s and since then have been making work that plays with and interrogates the complexities of contemporary queer femininity in performances that draw from cabaret, costume-based and alter-ego performance, spoken word, agit-prop theatre, stand-up comedy, video and sound art, installation and intervention. These performances reflect an ongoing quasi-pseudo-autobiographical meditation on female composites, class mobility, sexuality and style.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on spoken word performance; this project, in book form entitled Poetry’s Bastard: The Illegitimate Genealogies, Cultures and Politics of Spoken Word Performance in Canada, is forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. My current academic work focuses on the social life of queer and feminist grass-roots performance. This work includes a book on transnational cultures of queer and feminist cabaret, provisionally entitled Sliding Scale, and a large-scale archive and ethno-historiography of feminist and queer community-based performance and media in Canada, called Viscera & Ephemera. I am also in the process of developing a collaborative research-creation project with Jasmine Rault and Dayna McLeod, called the Cabaret Commons: a user-generated digital archive and gossip rag for grass-roots queer and feminist artists, audiences and researchers. We are preempting the creation of this archive through a project/process we’re calling “Feeling Speculative in Digital Space”; over the course of the next year or so, we’ll be doing some utopic imagining for a digital space that is informed by feminist and queer ways of knowing, being, and making.

I am deeply committed to the knowledges and aesthetics of transformational and anti-normative media, performance, subjects and scenes, and my art-research-activism moves through the politics, spaces and places of genre, memory, agitation, consolation and perverse identities and identifications.