Queer Hope in Working-Class Performance: Scottee’s Bravado and Class

Abstract

In contemporary Britain, the working-class subject is often portrayed as abject, deficient, and undeserving. In this article, I survey how mainstream theatre has often been complicit in replicating and authenticating these representations of the working class without offering an alternative. I argue that queer performance forms are a way of altering and undermining this narrative of working classness as a deficit. The queer working-class subject is defined by a sense of not fitting in to either the queer or working-class community and is therefore in a unique position to challenge a unifying representation of the working class. In particular, the queer aesthetics identified in José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of utopian performance and the dialectic of hope and disappointment offers both a critique of the present and a look to the future beyond the inevitability of capitalism and heteronormativity. I analyse Scottee’s solo autobiographical performances Bravado (2017) and Class (2019) through the lens of utopia and hope and how the performer’s status as a queer and working-class artist allows him to offer alternatives to the here and now.