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Paper short abstract

This paper argues how performing, conversing and doing theatre based workshop reveals queer stand-up comedian's relationship with censorship. The use of multimodal practices allows for understanding censorship as an embodied phenomenon enabling knowledge production with heterogenous meaning makings.

Paper long abstract

Being on stage, sitting in the audience, facilitating workshops, I take multiple subject positions as a researcher studying humour and politics. In this ongoing ethnographic research with queer stand-up comedians in India, I experiment with multiple practices such as performing stand-up comedy myself, being a spectator, having in-depth conversations with the comedians and conducting collaborative workshops with them borrowing from theatre of the oppressed, somatic research methods and participatory research. The multimodal repertoire becomes crucial in generating insights on humour and politics, more specifically on how queer comedians, including me, experience humour. By being both researcher and performer, I explore, the relationship, which queer stand-up comedians have, with censorship. In the paper, I do not view censorship as only suppression of speech, but tap into visceral ways in which censorship is felt and experienced – in the body and through the bodies. I examine how these experiences reshape the architecture of performance and rearticulate queer politics. The paper ultimately argues how multimodal practices emerge out of active listening to and in the field and shaped by constant frictions. These entanglements unfurls possibilities of knowing and relating with each other in myriad ways. Consequently they open up avenues for knowledge production with heterogeneous meaning-makings.