This article compares the two major figures of Chilean and South African theatre, in particular two intimate realist dramas onstage and onscreen in the 1970s and 1980s, when both countries were ruled by tyrannies tolerated by governments in the so-called free world. In Boesman and Lena and Hechos consumados the depiction of solidarity against the dispossession caused by ‘capitalist revolution’ in Pinochet's Chile or Afrikaner capitalism in apartheid South Africa still resonates today when the rhetoric of struggle appears compromised by the culture of consumption and when post-apartheid and post-dictatorship governments retreat from ‘suspended revolution’ in a world shaped not only in the global South but also in the affluent North by neo-liberal axioms of shrunken government and free markets for the rich against austerity for the poor.

Lest We Forget, my current research project at Concordia University, critically analyses the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Stretching over three decades and taking the country's bilingualism into consideration, its objectives are to study the aesthetic variety and political complexity of plays and performances that attend to the epidemic and to identify the multiple challenges faced by theatre artists and activists. Furthermore, the project explores the methodological and historiographical challenges when studying HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in a Canadian context.

Los Invertidos (1914) by the Argentinean playwright José González Castillo (1885–1937) is probably the first play in the Spanish-speaking world to treat ‘sexual inversion’ – code for homosexuality in turn-of-the-century European sexology – as material for the modern stage. A three-act drama realista (‘realist drama’) that sets out to present ‘sexual inversion’ in a recognizably Argentinean setting and idiom, Los Invertidos demonstrates, as Edward Said puts it, that ‘ideas and theories’ – in this case about modern drama and sexuality – ‘travel’. González Castillo launched queer visibility on the Argentinean stage with dramatic models and embodied behaviours forged from international and local sensibilities. I argue that Los Invertidos, while shaped by sociopolitical and aesthetic upheavals in the Southern Cone, invites us to place its theatricality in a queer ‘genealogy of performance’ that crosses geographic and linguistic boundaries. How we describe and contextualize queer theatre today might well be informed by González Castillo's innovations and confusions during modern drama's early decades.

This short piece highlights a current spurt in queer researcher–practitioners doing practice as research (PaR) in higher education and explores potential reasons why PaR is so vital, appealing, useful and strategic for queer research. As a starting point, we offer the idea of messiness and messing things up as a way of describing the methods of PaR. Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research. The latter places what Robin Nelson calls ‘hard knowledge’ above tacit, quotidian, haptic and embodied knowledge. The methodological and philosophical impulses of PaR make space for a range of research methods inherently bound up with the researcher as an individual and the materiality of lived experience within research. Yet, in our experience, although each PaR project is individual, PaR projects follow certain shared modes evolving largely from embodied and heuristic research methods adapted from social sciences, such as (auto)ethnography, participant observation, phenomenology and action research. PaR methodology in theatre and performance is composed of a bricolage of these openly embodied methods, which makes PaR, as an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries, somewhat queer in academic terms already. It is unsurprising, then, that PaR is so attractive to queer practitioner–researchers bent on queering normative hierarchies of knowledge.

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “talk back”, aiming to challenge, contest and problematize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects'. Works such as Miller's Glory Box (1999), which used his personal history of having a partner who is not a US citizen to discuss gay marriage and legal immigration for same-sex couples, and trans and Tamil performer D’Loco Kid's D’FaQto Life (2013), which presented an intersectionally marginalized trans person of colour's experience and narrative, have been critical in supporting political and personal empowerment for audiences and performers alike.

Under the conditions of neoliberalism, the desire to acknowledge difference may blur with a contemporary demand for the same. How might queer solo performance allow us to historicize the cultural and political exigency of exceptional subjects? An example: in recent weeks, I have been preoccupied with British writer and director Neil Bartlett and designer Robin Whitmore's A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. The piece is a sequence of devised works staged between 1987 and 1990 dedicated to the memory of Simeon Solomon, a ‘short, red-haired, ugly and flagrant Jew’ and contemporary of Oscar Wilde born to a good family whose ‘fallen life’ was dedicated to the pleasures of alcohol and rough trade. Inspired by Solomon's paintings and his prose poem from which the work takes its title, the performance is drawn from fragments of text and (auto)biography: images and words from the late nineteenth century colliding with the experience of being a gay man in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Originally presented as a solo work, later iterations were performed by Bartlett alongside three London queens: Bette Bourne, Regina Fong and Ivan.

Before the rise of the political and theoretical project of ‘queer’ (which, in my estimation, is a second-wave millennial project begun in the 1990s), scholarly and performative lesbian practices were situated within and against feminist scholarship. Early on, the agenda was to establish lesbian visibility and, in consequence, to reveal and deconstruct the structures of representation, on the stage and on the page. Indeed, the context for lesbian work was intentionally composed of women, misunderstood as separatism, while actually creating a fully gendered notion of surrogation. By this I mean to gesture to Joseph Roach's notion of surrogation as ‘improvized narratives of authenticity and priority’ that can ‘congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’. In situating lesbian visibility strictly within the gendered category of women, a genealogy and authenticity were invoked for its representation that were removed from the violence of binary logics of gender.