Trans and Queer Voices in Performance Research: Publishing Workshop

In 2025/26, TORCH Performance Research Hub hosts a series of study days bringing together artists, scholars, performers, and activists to explore the role of trans and queer voices in performance and performance research. Across panels, performances, and provocations, the series investigates how trans and queer practices rework histories, generate alternative publics, and activate new political imaginaries. Discussions between artists and scholars—as well as live performances, readings, and workshops—offer forums for critical engagement with trans and queer work in and beyond performance.

The series invites scholars and practitioners to consider performance not only as a mode of expression but as a method of world-making: a way to expose and reconfigure relations between bodies, institutions, and publics. Across panels and conversations, we will think with the tensions and frictions that animate trans and queer performance—the negotiations between visibility and opacity, vulnerability and resistance, flourishing and exhaustion.

Throughout its sessions, the series explores poetry, theatre, drag, performance art, music, fiction writing, and speculative history to consider how trans and queer performance mobilises language, embodiment, and voice. Panels examine poetic and theatrical forms as strategies of world-building and survival; fictional and fabulatory methods that reclaim and distort official histories; and expanded vocal and bodily practices that challenge fixed notions of identity, presence, and legibility. The final workshop turns towards live readings as practices of community formation through which writing nurtures and amplifies queer and trans collectivities. It also explores how processes of publishing and fundraising can extend these practices—transforming acts of creation into networks of care, visibility, and shared possibility.

The organisers are grateful for the support of TORCH, the Ruskin School of Art & the Faculty of Music.

“Literature does not just depict us. It is not merely ‘representation,’ as if we pre-existed the depiction. It is us in the act of constituting ourselves.” — Cat Fitzpatrick of Little Puss Press

Particularly after the 2025 Supreme Court Ruling, I want to ask: when we shout trans rights now, what is it exactly that we want? What world are we hoping for, and can that world be reliably produced within institutions or the framework of the state? In this workshop, we’ll consider how independent publishing practices contribute to the worlds we want to envision for trans people in the UK. Beyond the tropes and pitfalls of representation politics, we’ll ask instead how publishing practices can meaningfully contribute to communities socially, culturally and materially. How might the circulation of text help us develop collective conscience? How might reading events galvanise social bonds, or be used as fundraisers? How might literary pedagogy develop cultural and personal ambitions?

We’ll be comparing the work of contemporary trans and queer publishing initiatives, such as Sticky Fingers Publishing, Sissy Anarchy, The Bittersweet Review and Duke’s own publishing initiative TISSUE, to queer zines and pamphlets from the 70s–90s in order to understand how these practices have worked over time and what renewed urgency is being found today.

Whilst the focus will be on queer and trans publishing, the workshop hopes to impart skills and ideas for how publishing works as a political community building tool more broadly.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities