Sara Warner, associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, has published her first book, "Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure," in the University of Michigan Press' Triangulations series.

The book examines the mirthful modes of political performance by artists, activists and collectives that have inspired and sustained deadly serious struggles for revolutionary change. The book looks at such antics as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants and parades alongside more familiar forms of "legitimate theater."

Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Warner seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" for sexual politics.

This book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s-'70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety that lay at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era and uncovering original documents long thought to be lost. Juxtaposing historical figures such as Valerie Solanas, the Lavender Menace, W.I.T.C.H. and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists (including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers), Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates alternative political trajectories and new possibilities for being and belonging.

"One of my goals," Warner said, "is to map out the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as gayness as joie de vivre by highlighting the centrality of 'liveliness' to lesbian performance and protest."

Warner has published widely in the areas of dramatic literature; performance studies; prison theater; theories of sex, gender and sexuality; academic labor; and political activism. She is the co-editor, with Erin Hurley (McGill), of a special issue of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Spring 2012) titled "Affect/Performance/Politics." Warner co-authored the introduction and worked with contributors whose research engages with theater's relation to and use of emotion and feeling across time, space and genre. She is currently working on a second book and several commissioned articles about ludic forms of temporality that she calls "gay time."

She is spending her post-tenure sabbatical as a faculty fellow at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

Kathy Hovis is communications manager for the Department of Performing and Media Arts.