37 | 2023Performing Gender, Sexual and Racial Dynamics on the US Stage

This volume means to articulate contemporary performance with the dynamics of gender, sexuality and racial productions. It confronts the politics of representation by combining plural approaches of minoritized groups to hear out a multitude of voices fracturing hegemonic oppressive constructions. The contributors explore a wide range of forms and themes that yield complex performances of what it can mean to crisscross identities and identifications in novel manners. From theater history (staging of US playwrights in France or Armenian documentary theater in New York City) to the deciphering of the effects of Black queer rap through lyrics, videos and social media by way of the traditional stage, like improv theater and queer theater. It becomes clear that a dynamic politics of representation can only emerge from a transdisciplinary approach, as in this volume with the conceptual hybridizing of philosophy, history, sociology, politics, media studies and, of course, theater and performance studies. Included in this issue, two interviews—one with a major US theater scholar, the other with an emerging theater maker—prolong how theater has and continues to produce confluences of experiences through personal, intimate and expert voices. The play published here for the first time enriches greatly the meaning of contemporary drama through a metatheatrical voyage through queer lives. Finally, the publication of the RADAC Master’s Prize provides an apt afterword by decentering the issue and by taking us into the deeply socially-conscious world of Edward Bond.