Alison Reed investigates the border- and boundary-crossing performance of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’sTransBorder Immigrant Tool (TBT), an incomplete cell phone program that offers GPS, guidance, and poetry to those attempting to cross into the United States across the Mexico/US border. Reed suggests a provocation-based performance of “queer provisionality,” revealing the aesthetics of oppressive power structures by juxtaposing them to social utopias. Interrogating the national neoliberal project of both US liberalism and US conservatism, Reed’s essay is also a transcription of the performances launched around TBT, the social and political machinery set into motion by Electronic Disturbance Theater’s failed utopian project.
Articles by Alison Reed
Alison Reed recently joined the Department of English at Old Dominion University as Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Studies of Race & Ethnicity. Her work on queer networks of creative solidarity as well as social identities and technologies of power has appeared in several journals including Text and Performance Quarterly, Digital Creativity, Media-N, and Women & Performance. This article is excerpted from her first book project, “Traumatic Utopias: Staging Power and Justice in Black and Latinx Queer Performance,” which owes much to the support of her doctoral committee: Stephanie Batiste, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, J. Jack Halberstam, and George Lipsitz. The author is also grateful for the fellowship of the Antiracism Inc. Working Group convened by Felice Blake and sponsored by the UCSB English Department’s American Cultures & Global Contexts Center and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Finally, the author would like to acknowledge the generative feedback of her colleagues and comrades Shannon Brennan, Jessica Lopez Lyman, Marzia Milazzo, and Kristie Soares, as well as the Performance Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association, particularly Stefanie A. Jones and Eero Laine. Likewise, many thanks to Corinne Bancroft, Steven Osuna, and Amanda Phillips for reading earlier drafts.