Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill Aaron C

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2008 Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill Aaron C. Thomas Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE & DANCE VIOLENCE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT IN THE PLAYS OF DAVID RUDKIN AND MARK RAVENHILL By AARON C. THOMAS A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008 Copyright © 2008 Aaron C. Thomas All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Aaron C. Thomas defended on 26 March 2008. ______________________________ Dr. Mary Karen Dahl Professor Directing Thesis ______________________________ Dr. Carrie Sandahl Committee Member ______________________________ Dr. Natalya Baldyga Committee Member ______________________________ Dr. T. Lynn Hogan Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 1. RUDKIN: SACRIFICE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT...........................................................14 2. RUDKIN & RAVENHILL: MALE RAPE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT.............................25 3. RAVENHILL: THE CONSUMER AND THE QUEER SUBJECT.........................................39 CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................51 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................53 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................57 iii ABSTRACT This thesis is focused on the intersections of queer theory and violence. Specifically, I look at how acts of violation define and inform queer subjectivity in theatrical representation. Many theatre artists and practitioners use violence to describe gay, lesbian, and queer people on stage. This document examines two queer playwrights from Great Britain, David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, and the ways in which they use violence to define and constitute the queer characters in their plays. I am interested in violence as a single but important determining component of the ways in which audiences perceive queer characters. I will focus on how Rudkin and Ravenhill create characters through a dramaturgy that uses both sexuality and violence to formulate subjectivity. The thesis is comprised of three chapters, each of which covers different acts of violence. The first chapter is focused on the queer body as a combative force against acts of violation in David Rudkin’s plays Afore Night Come and The Sons of Light. Chapter two is an examination of male/male rape in Rudkin’s The Sons of Light and Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Chapter three continues to look at Mark Ravenhill, this time discussing violence against women in Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House. For better or worse playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists continually use violence to speak about and define gay, lesbian, and other queer bodies. One of the purposes of this document is to show just how much influence theatrical representations of acts of violence have on representations of the queer subject in the theatre. iv INTRODUCTION Sex and violence—that indiscreet pair of topics—comprise the subject matter of the pages that follow. Specifically, I am interested in investigating the collisions and links between acts of violation and people who identify with queer sexualities. It is my belief that queer theory as a discipline has so far only scratched the surface of the topic of violence and has yet to commit fully to a discussion of how acts of violation shape gay, lesbian, and other non- heteronormative identities. For our society, sexual desire has become one of the most important definitional components of identity, public and private. In a society as saturated with violence and as obsessed with sex as ours is, and with the proliferation of queer figures in dominant media, I see a need to explore how acts of violence shape these few (but increasingly more visible) representations of those who identify with sexual desires that fall outside of the norm. Though the association of queer sexualities with violence is pervasive in literature and in the popular consciousness, this study will focus on David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, two British queer-identified playwrights who write queer-identified characters that commit, observe, and collude with acts of violence on stage. The dramaturgy of both playwrights is concerned fundamentally with exploring subjectivity, and both playwrights frequently use violence and sexuality in their plays as sites for this exploration. My interest is in how representations of violence inform and influence queer sexuality and queer identity, and how queer sexuality has an effect on representations of acts of violation. I am most concerned with the interconnectedness of the two: how playwrights and other makers of art use sexuality to influence popular understandings of violence and how they use violence as a dramatic tool to shape popular conceptions of queer sexualities. Identity The words “gay,” “homosexual,” and “queer” are used virtually interchangeably in popular discourse and in dominant media. In this study, however, each of these words will be used much more judiciously. The purpose of this is specificity. All queer people are not the same. We have different bodies, energies, and desires, and though queer sexualities are non- normative from the perspective of heterosexuality, neither is there a normative, fixed homosexual identity that can easily be contrasted with the heteronormative. The adjective “homosexual” describes female sexual activity with other women as well as male sexual activity with other men. As a noun, the word has the ability to define a person who engages in homosexual activities as possessing an identity based on these activities. The noun “homosexual,” then, is defined by its difference from the noun “heterosexual.” Anyone who engages in sexual activity with someone of his or her own gender may be considered a homosexual in popular discourse. I will use the word almost exclusively as an adjective. When I reference a “homosexual subculture,” I describe a subculture of homosexual sexual relationships, not a culture of men who understand homosexuality as their identity. I understand homosexuality as activity and not identity. Though the term is popular as a description of identity, as the plays this document 1 discusses will attest, the noun “homosexual” (like the noun “heterosexual”) does a rather poor job of describing a human being who possesses a range of sexual desires and whose body is capable of any number of (sexual) activities. “Gay,” for the purposes of this study, refers only to women and men who subscribe to the identity of the noun “homosexual,” women and men who see their identities as inextricably attached to their sexuality and have come to see themselves as part of a (minority) community of homosexually-identified “gay” people. I intend to use the word “gay” as a description used exclusively for people who see themselves as a part of this minority community defined by their sexuality. The term excludes men and women who consider themselves heterosexual but have engaged in sexual activity with members of their own gender, as well as transgendered men and women. The term is also restricted to a time period where gay people understand themselves as a minority group. To use “gay,” then, as a descriptor for historical figures such as Cleopatra or Socrates or William Shakespeare is anachronistic, a projection of a twentieth and twenty-first- century understanding of sexuality onto time periods that understood sexuality in a different way than we do. When research shows that historical figures long assumed to be heterosexual actually engaged in homosexual activity, scholars often employ the word “queer” to describe their sexuality. This is not to say that James I or Sappho or Alexander understood their sexual lives as deviant in any way, but that we understand their sexualities now as deviant from a heterosexual norm. To acknowledge the sexual practices of these men and women as queer is to rescue their activities from the hegemony of assumed heterosexuality and place each of them within a larger picture of sexual practices that do not always fit into the homosexual/heterosexual binary so prominent in popular discourse. An act of criticism that troubles the assumed heterosexuality of an historical figure or finds queer elements in a heteronormative text is often referred to by scholars as “queering.” Carrie Sandahl defines the technique in a 2003 article for the journal GLQ: “Queering describes the practices of putting a spin on mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts; of appropriating a representation for one’s own purposes, forcing it to signify differently; or of deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism.”1 The technique has been widely used by

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