Dancing southern diaspora: Alvin Ailey’s blood and the backwardness of quare disidentification

Storying the Repertoire: Performing a Slow and Queer Backwardness at the Upstairs Lounge

“…However, I am skeptical of bitterness, defeatism, and self-hatred as viable queer political and creative praxis. I do, however, find truth in Hatfield's (2017) theorizations of Southern queer backwardness. Hatfield advances a theory of queer performance temporality that champions being backward in ways that "signify southernness against the unyielding temporal progression of the hegemonic American North" (p. 54).…”

“…The slowness I embody in my performance derives its affective power from the critical queerness of backwardness. Queer theorists have long written on backwardness as a political structure of critique (Love, 2009) and blueprint for queer aesthetic composition (Hatfield, 2017). Love (2009) writes that the political and aesthetic sensibilities of feeling backward "register those painful negotiations of the coming of modern homosexuality" that are yoked to feelings of "nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness" (p. 4).…”