Assistant Professor, Performance as Public Practice
Enzo E. Vasquez Toral is a Peruvian performer, scholar and educator whose expertise lies in the intersection of theatre and performance studies, queer and trans* studies and Indigenous studies in Latin/x America. His first book project, tentatively titled Folkloric Queens: Performance, Queerness, and Indigeneity in the Andes, investigates how queer and trans theater, dance and drag artists have rethought normative notions of Andean folklore through performance in the 21st century. As a theorist, practitioner and ethnographer, he engages with a transdisciplinary and decolonizing approach to research that centers performance as a site of alternative worldmaking.
Vasquez Toral’s publications have appeared in journals such as Modern Drama, El Alto, Theatre Journal, Ecumenica, Theatre Annual, Latin American Theatre Review and Performance Research; and in edited volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, Queer Nightlife and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre. He is an active member of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) where he current serves as elected Secretary for the Performance Studies Focus Group (PSFG). He was awarded as Emerging Scholar by the Mid-America Theatre Conference in 2020 and by the PSFG at ATHE in 2018.
Before joining UT Austin, Vasquez Toral taught in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University. Previously, he was a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern, an Exchange Scholar at Stanford University and a Harvard Artist Development Fellow in São Paulo, Brazil.
Vasquez Toral holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, a M.A. in Latin American Literature and Culture from Princeton University and a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University.
What do you enjoy most about being a part of the UT Theatre and Dance community?
The creative community of students, faculty and staff who are devoted to practice and research.
What is your favorite thing about Austin?
The bilingual identity, cultural diversity, vibrant performance communities and the food.
Theatre and performance studies, queer and trans* studies, Indigenous studies, performance ethnography, Latin/x American and Caribbean studies, decolonial theory, oral history performance, practice-based research, folkloric dance-dramas, fiesta and carnival performance
Performance as Public Practice, Indigenous Performance of the Americas, Performing LGBTQ+, Performance Ethnography
Books
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Folkloric Queens: Performance, Queerness, and Indigeneity in the Andes (in-progress).
Articles and Chapters
- “Post-Folkloric Drag: México de Colores and the Theatricalization of Gender.” The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre, edited by Roberta Mock and Sean Metzger, Bloomsbury (forthcoming).
- “From the Club to the Fiesta: Drag and Folklore in La Familia Galán.” Queer Nightlife, edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón Rivera-Servera, University of Michigan Press, 2021, pp. 180–90.
- “Queer Fiesta: Hybridity, Drag and Performance in Bolivian Folklore.” Performance Research, vol. 25, no. 4, 2020, pp. 98–106.
- “Complicating Hybridity: A view from/through the Andean Patron-Saint Fiesta.” The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter Marx, Routledge, 2020, pp. 260–8.
- “Rethinking the Andean Fiesta in Cuir Folkloric Times” / “Repensar la Fiesta Andina en Tiempos de un Folklore Cuir.” El Alto – Queer/Cuir: Gender, Sexuality, and the Arts in the Americas, vol. 1, no. 1, 2019, pp. 56–74.
Book and Performance Reviews
- El fuego que hemos construido (The fire that we have built), by Maria Fernanda Gonzales, Teatro Británico (Lima, Perú), May 2022. Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 56, no. 1, 2022, pp. 121–5.
- Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance, by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Theatre Journal, vol. 74, no. 1, 2022, pp. 113–4.
- Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Life, by Kareem Khubchandani. Theatre Annual, vol. 74, 2021, pp. 91–2.
- Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas, by Jimmy A. Noriega and Analola Santana. Modern Drama, vol. 61, no. 4, 2018, pp. 599–602.