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Queer theory

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Articles 1 - 10 of 10

Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory

An Evolution Of Drag In Theatre: A Historical Reflection, Krista Peters Jan 2026

An Evolution Of Drag In Theatre: A Historical Reflection, Krista Peters

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will serve as an overarching analysis and historical discussion on the art of drag within the traditional theatrical space. By employing queer theory, I will analyze how the use of drag has evolved throughout the history of Broadway and the United States and how it is responding to the contemporary social attitude. Drawing from the arguments of Butler, Lorde, Rich, Foucault, and others, this thesis uses historical survey to examine the direct representation of drag in theatrical spaces in conjunction with each representation’s sociopolitical and cultural environments. Sociopolitical contemporary contexts of each representation influence not only the form …


Teaching Queer Theory And The History Of Sexuality With Margaret Cavendish’S The Convent Of Pleasure, Valerie Billing May 2024

Teaching Queer Theory And The History Of Sexuality With Margaret Cavendish’S The Convent Of Pleasure, Valerie Billing

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article summarizes my approach to teaching Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure in my course “LGBTQ+ Literature and Culture,” which I teach at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I demonstrate how I teach the play with excerpts from literary scholarship in queer theory in order to help students sharpen their close reading skills, teach scholarly engagement, and deepen students’ understanding of early modern and Restoration comedy and the history of sexuality.


Puppy Love And [Information] Play: An Intersection Of Theatre, Queer Kink, And Consent, Emily Kitchens Dec 2023

Puppy Love And [Information] Play: An Intersection Of Theatre, Queer Kink, And Consent, Emily Kitchens

Faculty Articles

This note from the field centers on a nexus of queer kink subcultures and consent-based intimacy work in theatre. I report, investigate and wrangle with the process of incorporating queer kink aesthetics into the production of Love and Information by Caryl Churchill I directed at KSU February 2023. What I have learned and hope to demonstrate throughout the paper, is that queer kink subcultures are often paradigmatic examples of communities built on consent, and we as performing arts practitioners can more visibly expand the margins of our cultural competency dialogues to not only include them but look to them as …


Review Of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability And Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nowell Marshall Nov 2020

Review Of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability And Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Nowell Marshall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Jason Farr's Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature


Queer Pregnancy In Shakespeare's Plays, Alicia Page Andrzejewski May 2019

Queer Pregnancy In Shakespeare's Plays, Alicia Page Andrzejewski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together queer and feminist theory, this dissertation examines Shakespeare’s representations of pregnancy divorced from their promised duration and promised end, revealing that the pregnant body is not wholly symbolic of futurity, chastity, or even heterosexual desire. In queer readings of Shakespeare’s plays and in the methodological debates that inform them, the pregnant body has been conspicuously absent, despite being often subsumed into definitions of heteronormativity and procreative reproduction. In feminist work on Shakespeare’s pregnant characters, scholars largely conflate pregnancy with maternity instead of considering the ways in which these women might engage in non-heterosexual forms of intimacy and eroticism. …


Review Of Heteronormativity In Eighteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Kevin Bourque Oct 2017

Review Of Heteronormativity In Eighteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Kevin Bourque

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.


Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick Apr 2016

Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …


Devising Performance & Queer Futurity, Brendan F. Leonard Jan 2016

Devising Performance & Queer Futurity, Brendan F. Leonard

Honors Theses

This project argues that devising performance is an inherently queer and utopian form. In response to recent political movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, which seek to stage dissatisfaction with the systems of late capitalism, I turn to devising performance as a site. Informed by the queer and performance theories of Jose Esteban Munoz, Lee Edelman, and Jill Dolan, I argue that devised theater allows us to process disillusionment, rehearse collectivity, and stage futurity. In conversation with Munoz, I define futurity as an imaginative site that considers what will follow what some scholars suggest will be …


Aristotle, Performativity, And Perfect Friendship In Shakespeare, Ryan Engley Jan 2011

Aristotle, Performativity, And Perfect Friendship In Shakespeare, Ryan Engley

Undergraduate Review

From childhood, most of us have been taught that our “identity,” both how we see ourselves and how others see us, is shaped at least in part by our friends: “you are the company you keep,” as the cliché goes. Experience will teach us that not all friendships are the same, much less equal, even if we never hear of Aristotle and his tripartite scale of friend-types. His categories were of course born of the classical world but, true to fashion, remain valuable barometers for measuring individual identity and desire in friendships. They’re useful, too, in understanding Shakespeare’s characters and …


Truly An Awesome Spectacle: Gender Performativity And The Alienation Effect In Angels In America, Allen Gorney Jan 2005

Truly An Awesome Spectacle: Gender Performativity And The Alienation Effect In Angels In America, Allen Gorney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tony Kushner's two-part play Angels in America uses stereotypical depictions of gay men to deconstruct traditional gender dichotomies. In this thesis, I argue that Kushner has created a continuum of gender performativity to deconstruct these traditional gender dichotomies, thereby empowering the effeminate and disempowering the masculine. I closely examine Kushner's use of Brechtian and Aristotelian tenets in the first Broadway production of the play to demonstrate that Kushner sought to induce social awareness of gay male oppression, contingent on the audience's perception of Kushner's deconstruction of the traditional gender dichotomy. I also scrutinize the role of the closet and its …