Abstract: This article argues that Split Britches’ Lost Lounge (2009) uses butch/femme aesthetics to (re)activate queer history and memory to resist the intertwined forces of aging and urban gentrification. Set in an underground lounge in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood, Lost Lounge stages a world on the brink of disappearance for veteran performers Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Through its embrace outdated cultural source materials, the performance reimagines queer futurity against neoliberal disposability, revealing how capitalist logic privileges the new (and young) over the old. Drawing on age studies and queer studies discourses, the author reads the performance as an embodied archive where its aging performers transmit histories that resist normative models of co-called progress.
Benjamin Gillespie (Fri,) studied this question.