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The third issue of Movement Research Performance Journal, to which the PJ editors requested we respond, is comfortingly of its (1991) moment: an interview with auntie Kate Bornstein; research into the “gender community (transvestites, cross-dressers, transgenderists and transsexuals);” a strong and somewhat stick-bending emphasis on how drag isn’t about sex change. What’s changed and what hasn’t? We’re in a different period of profound political reaction in which there are also, empirically, many more people alive who understand that they have a stake in the thriving of trans people, which both centers on and means more than the ability of people to change sex. 

In this section, I invited a roster of primarily trans writers and performers to reflect on social encounters and cultural forms that make life worth living, even as they also freight it with stress and challenge. More frequently than not, nightlife sets the stage for the encounter — Josie Bettman asks if “the nightclub is a theatre”— though the reason for this has less to do with the power of a particular space or musical genre than the fact that party culture, like church, brings people into contact in such a way that they can become something else through each other. The LEGACY Black Queer Production Collective (Kyle Carrero Lopez, Garrett Allen, Arewà Basit) reflects on “learning, growing, and building new modes of being” through the scenario of dance music, which reverberates well after the lights go up and the fog clears. Rayna Russom examines the longest interval of that reverberation — across life and death — observing that whenever anybody dances, they move as others have taught them to move, only some of whom are currently alive. The process of how people at any point come to understand themselves as a single political constituency is obscure, but not unclear. Aaina Amin insists: “later there is a we and it’s waiting.”