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

Abstract

This article ruminates on the 1989 funeral of choreographer Alvin Ailey during which selections from his famed ballet Revelations were performed beside his corpse. When read in context, I argue the dances necessitate a reconsideration of disidentificatory performances as not always necessarily strategic or predetermined but also as unconscious manifestations of past times and cultural traditions that queerly resist the regiments of normative temporalities and sexual epistemologies. I introduce quare disidentification as a spliced hermeneutic for addressing vernacular performances by minoritarian subjects that do not so obviously disidentify with or disrupt the insidious problematics of public culture.

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