Festival 2026: Troubling The Lines
“In a country leaning hard toward fascism, seeking to strip us of agency means seeking to strip us of creativity. The creative person is a site of agency, intuition, patience, & deep listening. When told we are supposed to shut up & fall into line, the person who practices creativity is dangerous.”
“Identity, like a river, is always changing, always in transition, always in nepantla. ”
“You cannot river to ocean, and
Because right now you cannot
Contain in all, I heave
With your waters and all
They have unmoored”
The year 2026 has already been marked by increasing systemic violence and escalating state repression, targeting Black, Brown, immigrant, trans, queer and other marginalized community members. Amid these attacks, neighbors have held the line for each other. Artists have drawn lines speaking truth to power. On the horizon line that beckons our future, we are imagining – and creating – a more just world.
Holding the pain and possibility of this moment, we invite artists to create from a place of Troubling the Lines: disrupt expectations; celebrate what cannot be contained; interrogate boundaries; ignite limits; flirt with tipping points; play with form; and reimagine queer and trans futurity.
This theme is inspired by the 2013 collection Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics edited by TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson. Tolbert writes that this project is filled with "one hundred hands pushing against a wall of homogeneity — gendered, social and linguistic.” Tolbert describes the impetus for this project as “A need to find, feel, and experience community. A desire for intimacy. An exploration of space.”
Lines can denote linearity – a simple narrative structure, kronos time. Lines evoke lineage, continuity, circuitry; thread mending a wound, fiber patching a hole, wire connecting two distant companions. Lines represent edges, imply liminal space, articulate relationships, clarify stakes when everything is on the line. Lines can enclose, demarcate, overdetermine; lines are nylon strings, arms in space, bottom lines, assembly lines, picket lines, reading between the lines. Lines are words spoken out loud to an audience; are riffs to a melody, the tiny components that combine to form a complex image, phrase, gesture.
We are also compelled by John Lewis’s “good trouble, necessary trouble”; Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”; and Donna Harraway’s “staying with the trouble”. What lines need to be crossed, blurred, or defended? How do we reach necessary tipping points? What lines – paths, directions, scripts – need to be redrawn, reclaimed, rewound? What does it mean to bring the margins to the center?
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
“Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”