Rae Langes

I have a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Performance from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My research focuses on contemporary queer and trans performance and visual art in the U.S. and Latin America. My most recent project includes curating Mexico City-based multimedia artist Sofia Moreno’s solo exhibition Flores Nocturnas (Blooming at Night) at UW-EC’s Foster Gallery, which envisions trans kinship, pleasure, and futurity. My solo performances engage the intersections of queerness with power and desire and have been featured at interdisciplinary art events such as the Chicago Home Theater Festival and activist spaces like The Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma.

I teach courses for the LGBTQ Studies certificate and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major, minor, and certificate at UW-EC. In my courses, students learn to use intersectional feminist and queer lenses to analyze dynamics of power within institutional settings and everyday life. Performance figures prominently in my courses as an object, analytic, and method for understanding the social construction of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability, among other identity categories. Together with students I explore how performance (e.g., theatrical, activist) can be used as a transformative tool for engaging social difference, politics, history, and lived experience.