Embodied Resistance: a Historiographic Intervention Into the Performance of Queer Violence
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by Zachary Adrian Dorsey 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Zachary Adrian Dorsey certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Embodied Resistance: A Historiographic Intervention into the Performance of Queer Violence Committee: Stacy Wolf, Supervisor Charlotte Canning Pamela Christian Jill Dolan Mary Kearney Embodied Resistance: A Historiographic Intervention into the Performance of Queer Violence by Zachary Adrian Dorsey, B.A.; B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007 Dedication This work is lovingly dedicated to my mother, Adriana Dorsey: first teacher / best teacher. Acknowledgements I wish to offer my sincerest thanks to Stacy Wolf for seven years of inspired mentorship during my time at the University of Texas at Austin. Her guidance and support, along with the encouragement I received from my committee – Charlotte Canning, Pamela Christian, Jill Dolan, and Mary Kearney – have made this project possible. In addition to epic hand-holding and countless formative discussions about my work, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Hollis Griffin, and Heidi Wolf have read (and agonized over) every word of this dissertation, a feat for which I’ll be forever grateful. Chase Bringardner, Cameron Hummels, Ji Hye Kim, Sarah Kremen-Hicks, Paul Schimelman, and Susanne Shawyer all nurtured this venture with pointed questions, suggestions for source materials, and just the right amount of nodding and smiling. Words simply can’t convey the tremendous praise due to my family, Daniel and Adriana Dorsey, Kelly George, Hal and Diane Augee, and Kenneth Avio, who have supported me tirelessly throughout my education. Assistance in forms too diverse to describe has been provided by the staff at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library, employees at the University of Texas at Austin’s InterLibrary Services Office, Brian Mitchell at the Houston Grand Opera Archives, Bill Kaiser at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Tina Landau, Daniel Summers, Jr., Mark Pritchard, Chance Propps, Nat Miller, Seán McCarthy, Steve Kubenka, Erica Nagel, Henry Russell Bergstein, Kenneth Ferrone, Penny Arcade, Tom O’Neil, Kim Solga, Jordan Schildcrout, and members of the Society of American Fight Directors. They are fabulous creatures, all. v Embodied Resistance: A Historiographic Intervention into the Performance of Queer Violence Publication No._____________ Zachary Adrian Dorsey, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisor: Stacy Wolf This dissertation compares select moments of violence in queer history to their theatrical counterparts to investigate how perceptions and representations of violence shape queer lives. Though many scholars have already written about the queer dramatic canon, few have focused on the ways that violence functions within these plays structurally, thematically, or as integral part of the theatre-going experience. In addition to considering how past productions have configured these acts, my project describes how violence can be staged in resistant, critical ways that can both contribute to historiography and affect society at large. These enactments of history have the potential to exceed and overturn stereotypes of mere victimhood, and instead illustrate how queer subjects can and do assert their claim on America’s past and present. In my first chapter, I examine As Time Goes By (1977), Street Theater (1982), Stonewall: Night Variations: (1994), and Harvey Milk (1995), all works that invoke the 1969 Stonewall riots, an incident that has become synonymous with the rise of the gay vi and lesbian movement in America. My second chapter explores gay martyrdom as a representational trope in Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998), as well as in diverse works about Harvey Milk (The Harvey Milk Show [1991] and Harvey Milk [1995]) and Matthew Shepard (The Laramie Project [2000], Anatomy of a Hate Crime [2001], and The Matthew Shepard Story [2002]), men whose tragic deaths rendered them complex symbols for queer communities. In my third chapter, I detail the labor of queer street patrols and the Pink Pistols, real-life activist groups that have mobilized the threat of queer violence to combat anti-gay violence. I contrast their dynamic strategies to those imagined theatrically in The West Street Gang (1977) and Lesbians Who Kill (1992). Throughout this dissertation, I develop and offer a theory for staging these complicated moments of pain, protest, rage, and resistance, with the belief that (re)staging history is pivotal to the understanding and ongoing negotiation of these events and identities. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Queerness, Violence, Historiography, Practice…………………….1 Chapter 1: Staging Stonewall……………………………………………………..24 Chapter 2: Staging Gay Martyrdom………………………………………………96 Chapter 3: Staging the Threat of Queer Violence………………………………...147 Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Staging Violence Queerly……………………..208 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………225 Vita………………………………………………………………………………..235 viii Introduction: Queerness, Violence, Historiography, Practice This dissertation was inspired by an odd moment in my life in which my theatrical practice, my critical thinking, and my sexual identity were unexpectedly and unwillingly called into convergence. In July of 2002, I attended the Society of American Fight Director’s three-week National Stage Combat Workshop for the first time. I was looking forward to nothing more than a full roster of introductory courses that would improve my acting and movement skills, as well as force me to get about ten hours of exercise a day. This workshop was meant to be my summer break, my vacation from the intense scholarship and requisite brainy-ness that my graduate program demanded. Because I would soon be living and training with a group of one hundred complete strangers, I was looking to blend in; I had made the conscious decision to leave my “silence=death” t-shirt and other queer fashion accessories at home. I was heading to this workshop in Las Vegas as an actor, not as a scholar and certainly not as a homosexual. Having thus compartmentalized my various identities, I thought I was ready for anything. Though it’s a gross generalization, while I was at the workshop I learned that much of the punching that is done in stage combat is “non-contact,” meaning that one actor doesn’t actually hit the other, though the audience is made to think so through an array of acting and choreographic techniques. When fighting for film and television, however, actors are often asked to physically make contact with one another. Though the blow can be softened to a degree, a punch to the stomach is often just that – one actor punching the other in the stomach. In my first film fighting class, I was having a hard time differentiating between these two vastly different approaches. Because I was being cautious not to hurt a partner I had just met and begun working with, many of my 1 punches to my partner’s stomach either didn’t make contact, or only did so lightly, a fact that could be hidden from a live audience but that a camera would undoubtedly pick up on. The instructor, who happened to be the founder of the Society, noticed what I was doing and bellowed at me from across the room, “Just fucking hit him! He can take it! Aw, come on… You’re fighting like a God damn queer!” In the moment, of course, I was horrified. Publicly shamed, I spent the remainder of class working very hard not to “fight like a queer,” or perhaps, just not to be noticed. After class, as I began to process the comment, I tried to remember that his instruction wasn’t meant to be mean-spirited; it stemmed, in fact, from his desire to improve my performance skills. Other students who had worked with him before assured me that it was just his nature; his colleagues rolled their eyes when they heard about the story, but forgave him for his lack of tact and political correctness because of his age and because of his history with the organization. And I realized that the instructor didn’t know me from the next person, and so with his accusation wasn’t targeting me based on who I was, but rather on his own associative interpretation of what I was or wasn’t doing. All in all, his critique said much more about him than it did me. None of this stopped me from wondering what he meant by “fighting like a God damn queer.” Was he trying to articulate that queers are weak when they fight, or that they’re incompetent, somehow fighting “wrong?” Does queerness suggest an unwillingness to fight? Was there some longstanding historical stereotype about the nature of gays and lesbians fighting that I wasn’t aware of? As much as I tried to read his comment otherwise, I couldn’t help but think that there was something corrective in it beyond just theatrical practice. After all, “don’t fight like a queer” isn’t that far divorced 2 semantically from “don’t be a queer.” Unfortunately, by not addressing his comment at the time, I allowed him to define what queerness meant, both for me, and for the rest of the class. In retrospect, this moment tied violence and queer identity together for me in a very personal way. Almost in penance for not having challenged his critique, much of my scholarship and theatrical practice over the last five years have been aimed at trying to determine what it means to fight like a queer. That question, though not the explicit domain of this project, has caused me continuously to study occasions in the past and the present, onstage and off, where violence and queerness overlap. In Embodied Resistance: A Historiographic Intervention into the Performance of Queer Violence, I compare select moments of violence in queer history to their theatrical counterparts to investigate how perceptions and representations of violence shape queer lives.