Queer Americana: Affect, Embodiment, and Performing Archives

“Queer Americana: Affect, Embodiment, and Performing Archives” conceptualizes Americana as a queer aesthetic form and national affect. Colloquially, Americana refers to materials and designs that evoke nostalgia for characteristics of the United States and American culture, folklore, and history that are imagined as essential to the nation. This extends to red, white, and blue paraphernalia; US-based folk music genres; the feminized image of Columbia as the personification of the U.S.; the list continues. By these definitions, Americana is extensive; however, at this moment in the United States, the term is leveraged toward a white, Christian, conservative vision of the nation. The sites I study in this project flip this narrative to demonstrate how minoritarian communities navigate complicated relationships to nationhood and nostalgia and respond to histories of state-sanctioned neglect and violence.

This project approaches performance both as a site of study (through stage plays, museum curation, and music) and as a methodology that understands cultural knowledge as emerging from embodied experiences. Through ethnographic and archival research, I examine a broad range of commemorative, performance, and tourist sites across the United States—including but not limited to all-male collegiate drag musicals, political spoof films, tattoo museums, contemporary Broadway productions, and more—that contribute to the dynamic definition of Americana. Across these sites, artists negotiate this strange and uncomfortable tension of “being and feeling American” through comedy, joy, and protest.

“Queer Americana” expands the contested relationships that both performance studies (which emphasizes the ephemeral) and queer studies (with its weariness toward institutions) have with archival practices. Both fields have critiqued the archive for being white, exclusionary, and heteronormative. Yet queer and minoritarian performers have and continue to archive their lives, drawing inspiration for performance from these archives. Whether looking to revise history or imagine new possibilities, LGBTQ performers find themselves drawn to a national nostalgia that often feels contradictory or hostile, given the persistent gaps in institutional archives. In playing with popular understandings of history, minoritarian and queer artists subvert dominant narratives and insert their presence into the ever-changing meaning of Americana.