Description
TitleQueer visibility on the transatlantic modernist stage
Date Created2016
Other Date2016-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (vi, 214 p.)
DescriptionMy dissertation analyzes a selection of Argentinean, Spanish and U.S. modernist plays that dramatize the double movement of what I call “queer visibility.” That is, they make queer themes “visible” but also render the visible “queer” by extending our notions of modernist experimentation. Such experimentation, I argue, is intelligible only within a transatlantic history of, in Edward Said’s sense, “traveling” influences that have informed queer drama in the twentieth century. Each of the dissertation’s chapters offers a comparative angle on a playwright and their staging of queer materials, establishing surprising connections between various geographies and theatrical cultures. Chapter one analyzes the Argentinean José González Castillo’s naturalist play Los invertidos (1914), the first in its kind to plot the medical category “sexual inversion” as material for modern drama. González Castillo joins in the Argentinian vogue for realismo with its disjunctive relation to queer visibility, the latter a symptom of morbid degeneracy. Chapter two discusses the thoroughly anti-realist practices of queer staging in El público (1930), an unfinished, posthumously published play by Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, which imagines a paradoxical shape for queer visibility: “a theater beneath the sand” that draws on international vanguardist desires to offend rather than entertain audiences. The chapters on Los invertidos and El público present international models of queer visibility that cast new light on my two North American writers. Chapter three compares two works by the prominent U.S. playwright Tennessee Williams, the iconic Suddenly Last Summer (1957) and the little-known Kirche, Küche, Kinder (1979), that expose the mechanics of queer visibility as both perplexing and violent. Then I consider two understudied dramas of expatriate writer Djuna Barnes, the early one-act The Dove (1924) and the arcane verse drama The Antiphon (1957), which deploy a convoluted allegorical vision that projects an anti-modern strain in queer dramatic modernism. Combining formal analysis and historical research in each chapter, my comparative project aims, first, to theorize queer visibility as a recurrent theatrical problem grounded in material practices and, second, to contribute to a more nuanced and inclusive history of modern drama in conversation with transnational figurations of queer sexuality.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Ben De Witte
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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