“La Chica Boom and the Pedagogy of Queer Failure,” Theatre Topics, 30.2: 85-97, Project Muse. https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2020.0015.

In this article, I outline how Xandra Ibarra’s (La Chica Boom’s) spictacles were intended to “work” according to Ibarra. Based on interviews with the artist and other academic reviews, I claim that much of what Ibarra hoped to accomplish “failed.”  I go on to argue that her confrontational style of performance combined with her engagement with multiple intersecting identities was “too much” for many of her audiences; but that in reality, her “failure” can be read less as a study of Ibarra, and more pointedly as a study of her spectators and the violence minoritarian performers often face when confronted with majoritarian audiences.

This research interrogates the role that a queer and feminist pedagogy can have in performance and elucidates the quagmire that queer, brown, femme bodies find themselves in when they go onstage.  Moreover, this article engages deeply with the theoretical frameworks of disidentification, queer failure, and queer futurity to ask what happens when performances of queer failure, fail to fail productively?  This manuscript opens a discussion for how minoritarian performers can safely engage with majoritarian audiences and outlines the risks of a confrontational model of explicit body performance.