Kimberlee Pérez

As a scholar-performer I am interested in narrative performance that gets at constructions and embodiments of identity and relations. When someone tells their story in public—in particular those stories that do not circulate in mainstream culture—to an audience of self, an/other, or many in a performance space, connections and potentials can be revealed, made, even undone. In doing and telling we might find alliance, coalition, and other unknowns that differences in and discourses of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation often preclude. Performance is rife with possibility as well as danger. It is a site we can simultaneously reinforce and interrupt that which constrains and produces us; it is a site where resistance, decolonial practice, and social justice are sparked, realized, begun. My traditional and performance scholarship can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and in several edited volumes. I was part of an author team that published Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBT Worldmaking. My current projects include a performance piece about desire and queer relations and a book monograph on queer intimacy.

Courses Taught: 

COMM397 Performance and the Politics of Race

COMM497 Queer Performance and Publics