Dustin (Dusty) Goltz is a professor of performance studies in the College of Communication. He received his MFA in studio performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his BA and PhD from The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. His research interrogates how culture is constructed and reinforced through ritualized bodily action and storytelling—how we DO culture and identity through daily and routinized patterns of cultural exclusion and oppressive normativities. As a scholar/artist, Dusty’s research sits at the intersections of performance, rhetoric, queer theory, and communication, examining the discourses that circulate around gay aging and queer future, stigmatizations of aging LGBTQ bodies, the normalization of queer youth suicide, and the exclusionary discourses of heteronormative future. Situating much of his work in the LGBTQ community, Goltz’s research explores the shifting meaning of LGBTQ identity across queer generations and age cohorts, as well as across differing mediated and global contexts. He has worked with LGBTQ organizations in the local Chicago community, as well as conducted research and advocacy training with a research team in Kenya and Vietnam. He is the author of Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation (Routledge 2009) and co-author and editor of Queer Praxis: Questions For LGBTQ Worldmaking (Peter Lang 2015). He was the recipient of the Randy Award for Excellence in LGBTQ Scholarship in 2018, the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies in 2013, and an Excellence in Teaching Award from DePaul University in 2011. In a recent performance project, Fred Astaire’s Dancing Lessons, Dusty created and performed a one-person, multimedia, performative examination of shifting perceptions of queer male mentorship, LGBT aging anxieties, and the lingering cultural threat assigned to queer sexuality. The piece was presented as an invited artist at over a dozen academic and community spaces, including Villanova University, Louisiana State University, and Monmouth University. His most recent book, Comic Performativities: Identity, Internet Outrage and the Aesthetics of Communication (2017, Routledge) engages a range of conceptual lineages, including irony, camp, gender and racial performativity, whiteness, audience analysis, and queer theory to provide a complicating call to the overly-simplified engagement of aesthetic comedy in contemporary social media. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on performance and performance theory, sexuality, media representation and intercultural communication.
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