Steering Clear of the Wallowing Place: A Dramaturgy of Queer Tragedy

Queer art is mired in trauma and tragedy (Campbell and Farrier 14; Lovelock 555). While trauma is undoubtedly a key part of the Queer experience, but this does not mean the art made about Queerness must be traumatic (Haughton 19). Cultural material being produced recently seeks to walk this line but often fall into homonormative cultural scripts that demand Queer people be happy (Campbell and Farrier 13; Lovelock 550). The question then becomes: how can stories of the trauma Queer persons and communities experience be ethically created and produced in the theatre?

This paper will propose that a reclamation of the association of Queerness with tragedy via a Queering of Aristotle’s Poetics will provide a new way forward for the depiction of traumas endured by Queer persons and communities onstage. It will outline a set of conditions playwrights and dramaturgs can use to measure the potential harm their work may cause Queer audiences. Queerness as an orientation is deeply intersectional and so this paper will also avoid focussing exclusively on plays about cisgender homosexual men. They are not the only people who are Queer and so their plays cannot be regarded as the only Queer ones. Expanding the field’s view of Queerness in this manner allows for an intersectional critique of Queer representation rather than one that only benefits one facet of the community. In order to avoid what I call “the wallowing place” – a space wherein Queerness is pain and can lead only to tragedy – the tool that is used to dig our graves must become the one we use to escape them.