2009 ASTR Conference

Alfredo J. Sosa-Velasco, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The theoretical assumption that gender is performative, that gender operates as a performance—contribution due to Judith Butler—is now universally accepted and practically unquestioned. In Bodies That Matter, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Jacques Derrida’s theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity (95). It is not my intention here to question Butler’s definitions of gender or performativity, but to think about how from such conceptualizations we can understand gender and performance, when both actually appear together; that is, when characters onstage perform their gender as well as their characters, as in the case of three of Edwin Sánchez’s plays Trafficking in Broken Hearts (1992), Clean (1995), and The Road (1999). They are plays with queer themes and issues and with queer leading characters that are written by a queer writer.

I want to question some ideas in reference to queer theater and performance, as they construct a queer subject. By queer subject, I mean the conscious recognition of oneself as “different” and the deliberate rejection of a heterosexist worldview to refer to gay sexuality. This gay sexuality is infused with the sense of queerness and demarcates the site of queer representation and of queer politics. Theoretically speaking, gender and performance construct sexual identities in theater at two different levels: on one hand, the performance within the text (what is precisely performative), and, on the other hand, the performance onstage (how that is performed). I would like to suggest that an analysis of this kind will precisely show how performance as social practice and politics as social or political formations—from theater engaged in social issues to the performative dimensions of social or political practice—intersect with each other. Both performance and politics provides the subject with identity; above all, if we have in mind that U.S. Latino theater, in general, and U.S. Latino gay theater, in particular, is triply marginalized because of its ethnicity, class view, and aesthetics.

I am interested in highlighting that Sánchez’s theater is one that is built on politics of representation, identity, location, and affinity. First, his theater dismantles and undoes dominant stereotypical representations at the same time that it revises and rearticulates new ways of seeing in relation to gender and sexual identities. Second, Sánchez’s plays show the process by which a queer speaking subject constitutes himself in given social relations of power and discursive formations, while at the same time he positions himself in the dialectical of a subjectivity-in-process. Third, they situate the subject in a given geopolitical space, acknowledging the relations of power within that space and the identity formations that emerge from it. Four, it recognizes difference without attempting to erase uncomfortable and painful issues such as the articulation of gay identities, class boundaries, passing, and crossing over in Trafficking in Broken Hearts; the staging of the dysfunctional family, machismo, sexism and homophobia in Clean; and AIDS, journeys away from home and back home in The Road. Sánchez’s theater is the story of coming out of the closet. A firmly placed politics of affinity enables the protagonists of Sánchez’s plays to derive strength from their communities and their agencies.

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