Pressing back: Split Britches' Lost Lounge and the retro performativity of lesbian performance.

Using theories of affect and queer temporality, this article examines Split Britches' Lost Lounge as lesbian resistance to the pressures to remember or forget the past, condemn or embrace the future. In this piece, butch-femme duo Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver develop a retro performativity that pushes back against systems that strive to make lesbianism invisible, private, and apolitical. Through performances that resignify past pop culture artifacts, particularly the duo of Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Shaw and Weaver perform a past that is simultaneously lost and embodied, pressuring the audience to reconsider notions of progress and beauty.