Browsing by Subject "Violence in the theater"

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Embodied resistance : a historiographic intervention into the performance of queer violence
(2007-05) Dorsey, Zachary Adrian, 1978-; Wolf, Stacy Ellen
This study analyzes the development of Interactional Competence by a learner of Spanish in the study abroad context. The data are derived from six conversations between the learner and a native speaker of Spanish filmed over the course of the learner’s academic year abroad. The analysis of the data consist of two main foci: analysis of the learner’s displayed skills in speaker selection, alignment activity, and topic management, and how those skills evolved over the course of the year abroad; and analysis of the roles that the learner and the native speaker play in co-construction, again examining how those roles evolved over time. The learner’s level of development at the beginning of the year abroad in the three categories of interactional resources analyzed showed already relatively strong skills in speaker selection and nascent or undeveloped skills in alignment activity and topic management. By the end of her stay abroad, she showed stronger skills in both speaker selection and alignment activity, and improved though still limited skill in topic management. The learner’s development in these interactional resources is viewed as evidence of improvement in Interactional Competence. Examination of the roles the interactants assumed revealed orientation to the novice/expert paradigm, as evidenced by their discussion of language learning and by the prevalence of repair. In their discussions, the interactants propose an engagement in which the learner can participate in concert with an expert but with limited responsibility and available support. Over the course of the year, both of the interactants initiated repair less frequently, especially in terms of form-focused versus meaning-based repair. Orientation to the novice/expert dynamic and movement away from this dynamic over time was viewed as evidence of the learner’s trajectory from peripheral towards full participation in interaction. In addition, the learner’s movement towards fuller participation in the interaction was displayed in her greater activity in coconstruction while the native speaker held the floor, especially in terms of alignment activity. This research helps characterize and develop the notion of Interactional Competence and provides insights into facets of the development of the learner’s Interactional Competence in the study abroad setting.
Embodied resistance: a historiographic intervention into the performance of queer violence
(2007) Dorsey, Zachary Adrian; Wolf, Stacy
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 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.