Stages of Queerness (PDF)

Document from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: What is 'queer drama'? Since when have there been representations of queerness in British drama? Can we speak of queerness avant la lettre, and if so, what did it look like? How did queer representations in British theatre change throughout the twentieth century? What influence did stage censorship have on representations of queerness? What happened before the sudden eruption of queer drama after the abolition of stage censorship, and by which means could the legal taboo on queerness be circumvented? How did queer representations in the theatre influence notions of queerness in society and vice versa? These are some of the leading questions this book addresses.

Does this book have anything to offer you? Are you gay, lesbian, or heterosexual? Are you a trans-, a-, bi-, non-sexual being? Or are you insecure of who you are? Really, it does not matter very much. You are the potential reader of this book, and if you decide to go on reading you will read things that may prove of significance to you. Because you're human. You are a human being who can, potentially, fall in love, aren't you? If you are, this book concerns you.

Taking the beginning of the twentieth century as the starting point for discussion, this book aims at exploring representations of queerness in British drama before the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968 and at demonstrating that queerness did not merely appear in the margins of pre-1960s British theatre, but that it can be detected in its very centre, namely in many of the most popular and most successful plays of their time. To achieve this aim, a selection of plays by three eminent male playwrights writing within the British cultural and socio-political context of the first half of the twentieth century will be analysed.

The focus will predominantly be on plays by William S. Maugham (1874-1965), Noël Coward (1899-1973), and Terence Rattigan (1911-1977), all of whom were extremely popular and commercially highly successful at their time. Finally, this book aims at developing and testing a cognitive model of queer reading and writing strategies which is intended to enable us to account for this seeming paradox concerning queerness in British drama before 1968, namely the paradox that British drama is full of 'queer plays' in spite of the taboo on representing queerness: the model of the 'default reader' as it is outlined in the theory part of this book and applied in the (queer) readings of plays.
Now, let's get queer.