When I am Old, I shall Wear Purple Nail Varnish: Utilising performance art to construct queer spaces that celebrate and advocate for ageing bodies

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This practice research PhD will contribute to a paucity of academic and artistic materials by producing performance art addressing queer gerontology and the decline of safe queer spaces (Atherton Lin 2020), resulting from the increasing commodification, sanitisation and youth fixation of LGBTQ+ events. Following Morganroth's interrogation of the ageist 'narrative of decline (2004), Mangan's Staging Ageing (2013) explores this narrative in performance contexts, but not queerness. Edward's Mesearch (2018) situates his own ageing queer experiences within dance contexts, but not the wider field of experimental performance. These few texts exploring queer gerontology and performance do not consider the spaces in which queer ageing might be celebrated. This PhD will model radically re-imagined safe queer spaces that advocate for frequently excluded or denigrated ageing bodies. This will work in dialogue with Edelman's No Future (2004), Muñoz's Cruising Utopia (2009), and Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure (2011), which confront heteronormative examples of ageing and futurity stemming from the patriarchal, capitalist drive to reproduce. These texts offer potent subversive, agentive futures of queerness and ageing, which my practice research seeks to manifest.