This article adopts the lens of queer theory to examine the terms of inclusion of non-heterosexual identities within recent mass market role-playing games. Focusing on Lionhead Studios’ Fable and BioWare’s Dragon Age series, I suggest how the intersection of queer theory’s resistance of presumptive categories for sexuality and theories of game design – notably the concept of affordances – may provide for a critique of the performative constraints through which gamers are able to ‘play queer’. While even-handed dynamics of relationship game play may espouse a liberal rhetoric of inclusion, I propose that a predominant logic of sameness – grounded in an even-handed ‘blindness’ to sexual difference – may also restrict the possibilities for queer identification.
Mass vaccination programmes mean that poliomyelitis is almost a forgotten memory in the Global North. But in reality its effects continue as many people who contracted paralytic polio in childhood may develop functional deterioration (Post-Polio Syndrome or PPS) in later adulthood; mass migration and escape from violence means that it is also re-emerging in contemporary societies. Thus it is crucial for different audiences to have opportunities to engage with, and understand the life histories of polio survivors and their personal experiences of disease and disability across biographical and historical time. This article discusses the process of using recorded delivery verbatim techniques, with disabled and non-disabled actors, to translate ethnographic research about social history of polio into a creative accessible medium for new generation audiences to learn about the hidden, often contested, histories of disability and disease that may collide with professional, medical and public discourse. Our contention is that ethnodrama can give a voice to the voiceless, and enable them to contribute to the production of new knowledge, health interventions and policy instruments that affect their lives.
This book is a study of solo performance in the UK and western Europe since the turn of millennium that explores the contentious relationship between identity, individuality and the demands of neoliberalism. With case studies drawn from across theatre, cabaret, comedy and live art – and featuring artists, playwrights and performers as varied as La Ribot, David Hoyle, Neil Bartlett, Bridget Christie and Tanja Ostojić – it provides an essential account of the diverse practices which characterize contemporary solo performance, and their significance to contemporary debates concerning subjectivity, equality and social participation. Beginning in a study of the arts festivals which characterize the economies in which solo performance is made, each chapter animates a different cultural trope – including the martyr, the killjoy, the misfit and the stranger – to explore the significance of ‘exceptional’ subjects whose uncertain social status challenges assumed notions of communal sociability. These figures invite us to re-examine theatre’s attachment to singular lives and experiences, as well as the evolving role of autobiographical performance and the explicit body in negotiating the relationship between the personal and the political. Informed by the work of scholars including Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman and Giorgio Agamben, this interdisciplinary text offers an incisive analysis of the cultural significance of solo performance for students and scholars across the fields of theatre and performance studies, sociology, gender studies and political philosophy.
This paper offers a queer-theory inflected reading of identity practices in British Theatre-in-Education (TIE) work seeking to address sexual identity and, more specifically, homophobic bullying. Noting the potentially unmarked or socially invisible quality of queer identities, this discussion seeks to reconsider the status of 'coming out' as the primary formative narrative of gay subjects, and draws on Peggy Phelan's critique of visibility to examine the tensions between performance work which offers opportunities for public identification and the competing (legal and ethical) expectations of confidentiality and disclosure within educational settings. As such, this re-examination of the closet is read within the context of a wider British cultural and political landscape - recognising both efforts to directly address the issue of homophobic bullying, and the persistence of cultural anxieties about the supposed 'promotion' of homosexuality to the young. In response to those concerns, the paper draws together readings of recent TIE works - the Spare Tyre Theatre Company's Burning (2006) and Robert Higgs' Gay (2007) - with Stonewall's current Education for All campaign to explore performance representations of identity and identification, before suggesting - through the work of Judith Butler and Alexander Duttmann - the possibilities of a fluid relationship between recognition, legitimacy and cultural visibility.Peer reviewe
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