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The following is a conversation between Miriam Ginestier, Moynan King, and me on the topic of the romance between the Edgy Women Festival and Hysteria: A Festival of Women. Montreal’s Edgy Women Festival, organized by Ginestier and produced by Studio 303, ran in many formations from 1994–2016. Toronto’s Hysteria was co-founded by King and Kelly Thornton and produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Nightwood Theatre from 2003–2004 and then directed by King and produced solely by Buddies from 2004–2009. During Hysteria’s years of existence, the two festivals shared some artists, as well as aesthetic curatorial-social-political sensibilities.

This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproduction – the urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materials – offers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships. It takes the Cabaret Commons, the authors’ speculative digital archive of and for trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) grassroots performance scenes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, as its point of departure. The authors frame TFQ performance and party scenes as negotiated intimacies, cultivating ethics of vulnerability and risk, which operate within and as networked intimate publics. Reading across decolonial, queer, feminist, and trans- ethics and methods, this essay revisits the value of ephemerality, of strategic evaporation, non-storage, and forgetting in online research contexts.

Like the practices of drag itself, this workshop essay has been produced in and with community, geared towards many audiences and reliant on the expertise and creative intelligence of these communities and audiences. The Internet of Bawdies is the Internet of too much body. My working description of the Internet of Bawdies is, the (forced) digitization and onlining (publication, connectivity, searchability) of previously non-digital/not-onlined (Cowan & Rault 2018) ephemera of trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) community-based expressive cultures, including but not limited to drag, burlesque, kink shows, porn and erotica across medium, spoken word, slam and other text-based performance forms, and cabaret, whether is explicitly sexual or not, as well as the internet of sex work and other modes of consentual, adult online embodiment that exceed, transgress, resist or transform heteronormative, monogamous, reproductive bodies. While there are many sexes, genders and orientations in the Internet of Bawdies, here I focus on the ethics of TFQ digitization in this context. “Transmedial drag” is what I have identified as a method of study, knowledge production and citational practice developed on/in/of/with the Internet of Bawdies in mind. Transmedial drag are the processes involved in moving across media/mediums (for example: from live performance, to video documentation, to digital archive to online platform), which creates a sort of pastiche of the ‘original,’ denaturalizing its status as ‘originary’ and teaching us something new about the excesses and limitations of each media form. In particular, transmedial drag is a method for ethical engagements that researchers working with TFQ in the online environment, especially re-mediating materials to an online environment, might find they are already doing. There is a story in the moving across media, and transmedial drag is set of practices to tell those stories.

We first met around a workshop table at the queer Internet studies (QIS2) in Philadelphia in February 2017. This conversation began when we realized that we all had some disciplinary knowledges, training and practice that can bear upon queer Internet studies, but simultaneously we felt unprepared for the methodological-ethical challenges posed by the Internet as a queer research environment. Michelle was trained in ethnography as an anthropologist and Jasmine and TL were trained in humanities perspectives — mostly through literature, performance studies and art history, though about five years ago they had begun to retrain in the fields of online archives, pedagogies and networks, which has led to a new collaborative research project on digital research ethics. We had all been trained in dyke/queer/feminist methods and critical theory, and continue to work in this area. And we all were experiencing some gut feelings about the need for better understandings of disciplinary practices — what we are doing, how do we apply what we know how to do, and why are we doing it — across disciplines as we enter the Internet as researchers, in a research situation. What follows is a conversation the three of us had over email and videoconference between July–October 2017, which revolved around the question of what ethnographic methods can bring to Internet research, and what might queer and feminist research ethics look like in the context of digital research environments.

This paper considers recent transfeminist critical creative work through an affective trope contingently named here as that belonging to the “transfeminist kill/joy,” after Sara Ahmed's framing of the “feminist killjoy.” The trope of the transfeminist kill/joy can been read as a set of proliferating dialectics expressed as the rage that comes into being through living the violent effects of transphobia and trans-misogyny and through the practice of transformational love as a struggle for existence. The texts under consideration here work both to spoil feelings of political and social well-being or pleasure that are contingent upon the tacit absence or explicit exclusion of trans women in feminist conceptual and physical spaces and to re-structure, claim, and repair feminist happiness as a reparative impulse that holds these political affects in tension as creative potential.

Once you start to see bad debt, you start to see it everywhere, hear it everywhere, feel it everywhere.-Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black StudyIf you had gone to the opening of Rare & Raw: Queer History Then and Now at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian History in New York City on February 15, 2013, you would have seen among the small selection of artworks "exploring the themes of queer history, visibility and notions of representation" ("Rare & Raw" 2013) twenty-seven framed photographs from Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Photo Archive, originally created for and coanimated by Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film, The Watermelon Woman (Fig. l). Returning to the museum a few days later, you would have found the photos removed from the exhibit and in their place what looked like a foreclosure notice, or what we came to think of as the foreclosure installation: four documents taped to the wall, a record of the loan agreement between the museum and the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, which owns one of the three copies of The Fae Richards Photo Archive and which, on the day of the show's opening, "amended" the loan agreement such that there would be no loan at all (Fig. 2). With "regrets for the unfortunate timing and difficult circumstances," the loan was deemed too high risk and revoked, it seems, because of concerns about the material fragility and value of the photographs (Shim-Boyle, 2013).1The story of this amended installation is compelling to us for a few rea- sons. Most immediately, as dykes of a certain age, we have an affective, aesthetic, and intellectual attachment to The Fae Richards Photo Archive and to The Watermelon Woman; in fact, both of us became committed to the kinds of recuperative and critical feminist and queer storytelling that Leonard, Dunye, and their many collaborators in the project were for(a)ging in the early 1990s. Furthermore, this transaction situates the Leslie-Lohman Museum and the Rare & Raw exhibit (and its project of queer history-making) as unreliable borrowers; that is, the foreclosure installation advertises bad credit and both the museum and the exhibit get thrown into the subject position reserved in U.S. history for African Americans and other minoritized groups figured as socioeconomically delinquent. Moreover, the capital (not) exchanged in this transactionThe Fae Richards Photo Archive-is a series of images signifying the forgotten or abandoned African American lesbian histories that Dunye and her collaborators work to repossess and revalue in The Watermelon Woman, a repossession that might be said to expose the violence of (cultural) capital itself, a system that has historically devalued the lives and work of African Americans and queers. And finally, this story is compelling for us because in the moment of encountering that familiar scene-cheap paper printed with legal text, contradictorily taped both haphazardly and with forceful, binding purpose across a prominent wall (usually the front door of a repossessed property)-we were reminded of the ways in which so much queer history-making negotiates the strained relationship between good credit and bad debt. That is, the eloquent shock of this foreclosure installation activated our thinking about queer history-making through debt as a mode of inquiry, as methodology, as "queer hermeneutics" and "black study" (Crosby et al. 2012, 130) that "runs in every direction, scatters, escapes" (Harney and Moten 2013,61).Here, we propose that the repossession of The Fae Richards Photo Archive effectively resituates The Watermelon Woman and Rare & Raw into the context of debt culture. As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva remind us, this is a culture "embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land (conquest and settlement), exploitation of labor (slavery, indentured labor, forced migration), appropriation of resources, and ultimately the very meaning of debt in what Walter Mignolo calls the modern/colonial world system'" (Chakravartty and da Silva 2012, 364). …

In The Scene of Harlem Cabaret, Shane Vogel argues that, ‘the Cabaret school of the Harlem Renaissance took the collectivities of sexual, racial, gender and economic heterogeneity of the underworld not as a spectacle to define or discipline but as a location of social and subjective expansion’ (2009: 13). He notes that much of the regulation of cabaret spaces and, by extension, cabaret cultures during the time of the Harlem Renaissance had to do with a moral panic about the Jim Crow-era ‘social disorganization’ (2009: 13), characterised not only by race and class mixing, but especially by the excesses of the night, which cabaret (and this mixing) seemed to cultivate. Similarly, Laura Gutierrez (2010), in her work on feminist and queer caberetas politicos in Mexico, identifies both the flexible structure and what she calls the performance of delirio — an apparently nonsensical and frenzied stage behaviour — as constituting the politics, aesthetics and pleasures of cabaret performance. Here I shall argue that contemporary activist or politico (political, grassroots) feminist and queer cabaret is a translocal phenomenon that retains a dynamic, ludic capacity for ‘social and subjective expansion’ and ‘social disorganization’ (Vogel 2009: 13).1 That is, across locales, cabaret is a site for the performance of local specificities that gesture to, but are not reducible to, the nation; indeed, cabaret itself is a border-crossing activist performance method.