Echoes in the Wasatch: Resistant Composite Histories of Queer Uthans
(Performed at the Western States Communication Association 2026)
Abstract:
Echoes in the Wasatch is an oral interpretation performance that draws on a series of archived oral histories – found in the Utah Historical Society– of queer individuals across Utah to construct a composite narrative that challenges dominant historical silences surrounding collective regional trauma. Through embodied storytelling, the performance re/voices fragments of lived experience, moments of exile, faith, intimacy, violence, and resistance – revealing how queer life unfolds within a region where religious ideologies exert deep social, cultural, and political influence.
Rather than presenting a single, linear history, this performance assembles overlapping voices to illuminate the complexity of queer existence in a place where visibility is often dangerous. Each reinterpreted narrative carries the weight of systemic queerphobia while also honoring acts of survival, resilience, and refusal. By inhabiting these stories through performance, Echoes in the Wasatch transforms the archive into a living, breathing space where erased histories are spoken into being.
This work asks what it means to reclaim voice in a landscape shaped by silence: How do we tell queer stories in places where they were never meant to be heard? How can oral interpretation become an act of collective memory, resistance, and reclamation? Through the layering of personal testimonies, the performance insists on the presence of queer lives and reimagines Utah’s history—not as one of mere erasure, but as a site of ongoing struggle, survival, and becoming.
