Bird la Bird’s Travelling Queer People’s History Show showcased hidden queer histories of some of the UK’s best known museums and galleries. Bird presented material from her tours exploring sexuality, colonialism, incarceration and working class histories.
Bird explored the lives, loves and crimes of queer convicts in “Going Down” created for Tate Britain in 2017. “Who Created the Crime?” written in collaboration with Dr Rohit K Dasgupta uncovers the startling link between the National Portrait Gallery and the British colonial laws which outlawed queer sex across the British Empire. The same laws are still on the statute books in over 30 Commonwealth countries. Bird's outrageous exploration of sexuality, colonialism, incarceration & and working class histories blurs the line between comedy and performance art.
This event was part of LGBTQ history month.
Performer
Bird la Bird
Bird la Bird (she/her) is a queer femme performance artist whose work straddles comedy, history and performance art, and dubbed a Queer Pearly Queen and a Haute Couture Fishwife by critics and admirers. For the past seven years, Bird has been developing a series of performances interrogating the histories of Britain’s key cultural institutions, queering the chronicles and unpicking the layers of colonialism, class oppression, poverty and homophobia on which they were built. Drawing on her love of history and art Bird has created highly popular queer people's history tours of the V&A, Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery and the City of London.
Chair
Professor Bev Skeggs
Bev Skeggs is a Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University and a Former AFSEE Academic Director. She is one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the world, and has a wealth of experience addressing the multi-dimensional nature of inequality. Her book Formations of Class and Gender (1997) has been profoundly significant in drawing attention to the intersections between class and gender inequality, as experienced by working class young women dealing with the vulnerabilities of daily life in harsh conditions.
Banner Image: "Queer Victoria" by Holly Revell