Dallas J. Baker

Queering Practice-Led Research: Subjectivity, performative research and the creative arts

ABSTRACT Much of the discussion and debate about Practice-Led Research (PLR) in the arts and creative industries has been about what constitutes research. This article, in contrast, discusses what constitutes ‘practice’ and describes a form of PLR that is influenced by Queer Theory. This queered PLR foregrounds subjectivity as a practice in itself and views both creative practice and critical research as components in a Foucauldian ‘ethics of the self. In other words, this article positions subjectivity as the core practice leading both research and creative endeavour whilst simultaneously seeing creative practice, research and subjectivity as intertwined and mutually informing each other. In this way, a queered PLR can be seen to reframe creative practice and critical research as an ethical intervention into subject formation and knowledge production. This queering of PLR has the potential to innovate research in the creative arts and may give the creative arts researcher new tools to enrich creative practice, diversify research pathways and increase points of connection with creative artefacts or products. A queered PLR is also envisaged as a dynamic and performative pathway to new knowledges.

The screenplay as text: academic scriptwriting as creative research

ABSTRACT Screenwriting in the academy is an emerging research area. To date, it has been difficult to study screenwriting activity in higher education settings, not least because few academic journals publish screenplays. This is largely because scripts written in the academy have not been seen as research or as fully-fledged creative works worthy of publication. There has been a persistent idea that scripts are not stand-alone works but merely ‘blueprints’ for the films or television programmes based on them. This situation is now changing, with a number of academic journals publishing screenplays as creative research and treating scripts as texts in themselves, irrespective of production. This article explores the reasons behind the marginal position of screenwriting in the academy, which includes discipline bias, and argues for the repositioning of screenwriting as a valid and valuable creative and research practice. The article argues that the outcomes of this creative research, the screenplays themselves, should be treated as creative research texts in their own right that are deserving of publication irrespective of any staging or production. The article also discusses future directions of Screenwriting Studies as a scholarly discipline.

Ghosts of Leigh: scripting the monstrous effeminate

ABSTRACT This article describes how a practice-led research methodology used to produce a creative writing artefact, a short play aimed at a high school audience, had a transformative impact on a number of levels: on the artefact, on the writing practice itself and on the author’s own self-knowledge in terms of gender identity and subjectivity. The creative writing artefact in question is a short stage play entitled Ghosts of Leigh, an exploration of the gender-bending club culture of the 1980s. The play is set in regional Queensland, Australia, which, at that time, was a strongly homosocial and homophobic environment. The script and this article explore the notion of effeminacy as a monstrous masculinity of considerable discursive potency that simultaneously disrupts both masculinity and femininity. The article also discusses how the practice-led research methodology itself facilitated the development of fresh understandings around effeminacy and how these new understandings interacted with the author’s lived gender and embodied subjectivity.

Screenwriting as a Mode of Research, and the Screenplay as a Research Artefact

Screenwriting practice is now a flourishing mode of research within universities internationally, whereby the act of writing a screenplay or developing screenplay works is not only understood but also celebrated as a legitimate form of knowledge discovery and dissemination. The resulting work of this creative practice research, which we might call the ‘academic screenplay’, thus functions simultaneously as a method of research enquiry and a ‘non-traditional’ research artefact. In this chapter, we explore what it means to develop and write a screenplay in the academy, under the conditions of and for research. By positioning screenwriting alongside and in between the disciplines of creative writing and screen production, we reflect on how it can draw from both disciplines at different times and for different purposes and can be influenced by their specific—and sometimes contradictory—discourses. By doing so, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of screenwriting as a growing mode of research, and its practice as an important addition to the academy.

Play scripts as knowledge objects

This paper outlines the ways that play writing acts as a research method and plays can be understood as knowledge objects or research outcomes. It also argues that Playwriting Studies, an emerging research field, is best conceived as a sub-discipline situated within the Creative Writing discipline.

Creative Writing Praxis as Queer Becoming

This paper examines how writing practice and engagement with textual artefacts (literature) can trigger an ongoing queer becoming. The paper discusses how the queer subject and subjectivity are constructed in the production and reception of queer texts. In other words, it explores how queer subjects are constituted by the processes and practices of reading and writing. Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. An ethics of the self, or self-bricolage through writing, is a practice that has the potential to inform and alter the way subjects actively constitute themselves. Furthermore, creative and critical texts arising out of a queered aesthetics of existence can act as ‘models’ that strongly influence the ongoing becoming, and ethical refinement, of queer subjectivities.