The Queer Archive as Promiscuous Ethics of Care: (Re-)Activating Transcestor Kinship Structures in Travis Alabanza's Burgerz and Tranz Talkz

Abstract

[eng] Before the opening of their play Burgerz (2018) – performed around the time of the public consultation for the reform of the Gender Recognition Act – trans artist and activist Travis Alabanza held Tranz Talkz, a series of conversations with trans and gender non-conforming people throughout different theatre venues in the UK. Drawing on the central element of their show – the burger – these talks were held around tables where participants ate burgers and chips while discussing and sharing the implications of being a gender non-conforming person in contemporary Britain. With the aim of creating a sound archive of trans lives, the conversations were recorded and are now part of the personal records of the Hackney Showroom and will eventually become part of the LGBTQ+ archive at the Bishopsgate Institute. Together with these talks, throughout their play Alabanza draws on, and re-activates, a genealogy of mostly non-Western gender non-conforming identities such as the Hijra, the Kathoey, Two Spirit, Quariwami and the Femminiello, contributing with it towards their overarching project of archiving trans lives, as well as highlighting the need to draw on non-Western epistemologies of gender identity to counter contemporary forms of transphobia. Becoming the facilitator of a political discussion in which questions of care, empathy and mutual recognition became fundamental, throughout the talks Alabanza displaced care from the private sphere to the public realm, and from the individualistic neoliberal understanding of care as part of the selfcare industry to a queer understanding of care as communal. By looking both at the play and the recorded material from Tranz Talkz to which I had access before it is donated to the Bishopsgate Institute, this paper will suggest that the recorded conversations in Tranz Talkz, together with the performance of Burgerz, contribute towards the creation of a queer archive that, attending to Ann Cvetkovitch’s words, ‘preserve[s] and produce[s] not just knowledge but feeling’ (2003: 241). With this, Alabanza activates the trans archive as a form of ‘promiscuous ethics of care’ – defined by The Care Collective as an alternative form of caring kinship structures beyond the nuclear family (Chatzidakis et al. 2020: 23) – as form of undoing epistemic violence and countering transphobia.