Following shortly on the heels of the 2008 reissue of her influential text Feminism and Theatre, Sue-Ellen Case here brings together a selection of articles that trace her journey as a scholar and problematize the development of feminist and queer theory and performance in the United States since the 1980s. Despite the fact that each of the articles included in Case's Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies has already been published, each speaks to and against others to offer insight not only into their original cultural and historical contexts but also into our contemporary attempts to make meaning in an ever-confusing and unsettled global world. As usual, Case strives “to make certain relations visible” and mark “invisibility in the process” (13). In so doing, she troubles the already troubling binary relationships between feminist and queer theory, masculine and feminine, heterosexuality and homosexuality, gay men and lesbian women, and global and local.

Case's Introduction is retrospective yet introspective, tongue-in-cheek yet self-aware. She recognizes that each of the individual articles was written to respond to the most “lively debates of the moment” and was “consciously inscribing the social agendas and critical strategies of the times” (1). After acknowledging the various difficulties of making broad claims about particular eras, she briefly outlines the rise of feminist critical theory, queer theory, and the later “rise of transnational and new media studies” (5). Her outline proves useful, given that in it she places her essays into their original historical and also personal contexts. Case charts her journey as an academic from the campy style she modeled after her experiences at Maud's and adopted in an endeavor to find a lesbian scholarly voice, to her theoretical attempt to “find a way to install the feminist as a subject of time that could continue into the future” (13).

The book is organized thematically into three parts, entitled “Queer Theory and Performance,” “Feminist Performance,” and “Gendered Performance and New Technologies.” Somewhat embodying the notion that “the personal is the political,” Case begins her foray into queer theory and performance with a reflective essay entitled “Making Butch: An Historical Memoir of the 1970s” in which she attempts, in part, to “correct” her “earlier stance” about the relationship between butch and femme as outlined in the second chapter of the book, a reprint of her germinal essay “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.” She also, in part, attempts to “understand a different reception around issues of ‘female masculinity’” (26), which becomes evident through “the encounter between the classic butch and the hippie butch” and its somewhat performative “focus on style,” as opposed to the earlier polemic, which focused on the butch-femme as essentially “the way we are” (28–9). Throughout all of the essays in this part Case challenges binary notions of gender and sexuality, and in “The Queer Globe Itself” she troubles the mostly unchallenged conception that globalization is a “genderless, sexless phenomenon” (86).

The challenge continues throughout the second and third parts of the book. In Part II, “Feminist Performance,” Case traces the development of gender and sexuality studies in academia and argues that these areas of study are more “post-disciplinary” than “interdisciplinary.” This distinction is important because while interdisciplinarity, according to Case, “signals a sense of a unified field,” “‘post-disciplinarity’ retains nothing of the notion of a shared consciousness,” but instead “suggests that the organizing structures of disciplines themselves will not hold” (108). Part III, in postdisciplinary fashion, combines feminist and queer theory alongside cybertechnology and transnationalism. In “Performing the Cyberbody on the Transnational Stage,” Case notes that the “transnational zone is organized through licit or illicit relations across the bipolar [heterosexual] gender divide” and argues instead for a queer reading, which, while liberatory, is also laden with cultural imperialism (161, 165–6).

In her final essay, “Dracula's Daughters: In-Corporating Avatars in Cyberspace,” Case tackles the varying ways in which avatars often reify the normative among online identities. She concludes with a call for feminist and queer intervention, posing the question, “[W]hat if users with more activist agendas began to people cyberspace with the images of the poor, the weak, and the disenfranchised?” (185–6). Here, and in the concluding paragraphs of her “Introduction,” Case calls the reader to action both in cyberspace and in the material world. After detailing her attempt to “imagine something like ‘hope,’” she expresses her concern over the current state of affairs on our planet. She writes, “Will there be sustainable life on this planet?” and then critiques ecofeminism for instilling “an essentialist notion of ‘woman’ alongside neoRomantic notions of ‘nature’” (14). She charts her new route for scholarship in the future: “I must admit, I don't know how to write about ecological activism from a feminist or lesbian perspective. But I think I must try” (14). I suspect that an attempt to do so on Case's part will be a welcome addition to the field.