Since 2015, many politicians and cultural practitioners have celebrated the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States as a victory for greater equality. Evolved in response to the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s when mainstream homophobic discourse villainized people living with HIV/AIDS—and out of the rhetoric of diversity that emerged within public and institutional contexts in the 1990s—a narrative of individual rights and equality formed the mainstream understanding of gay liberation. This political construct privileges a framework of citizenship in which state processes are the only ways to claim benefits based on preexisting divisions between subjects, and it maintains the unequal distribution of vulnerability for already dispossessed communities, including queer/trans of color communities, the poor, the unhoused, and the incarcerated. In response, the dissertation explores anti-assimilationist politics found in queer cultural production, and looks to the work of contemporary minoritarian artists that reconfigure the space of politics beyond the juridical regimes of state inclusion. Presented a series of case studies, the dissertation draws from the relational emphasis of queer minoritarian performance studies, theories of spectatorship in the discourse of participatory art, abolitionist thought, and more liberatory reformulations of the queer agenda across disciplines, in order to analyze distinct artworks that challenge single-axis modes of identification and communion, and thereby, avenues of progress. It explores how artists advance queer political imaginaries by facilitating improvisatory modes of collectivity and contact across social divisions, or what I call "coalitional experiments." Critically untangling identity politics as a political strategy from a critique of systematic forms of oppression, the dissertation argues that this process is equally important in the sphere of contemporary art. If visibility and inclusion are presented as the ultimate goal within equality-based rhetoric, the dissertation posits that performance serves as a critical lens and an interventionist practice to reimagine citizenship beyond the realm of the individual and along shared—albeit incommensurate—conditions of vulnerability and need.