‘Citizens of fate’: Blood, disease and the question of mortality in Sadness by William Yang

Abstract

William Yang’s performance Sadness challenges essentialised categories of identification by juxtaposing tales of his Chinese-Australian family with the journey of friends from his community dying of AIDS-related complications and infection. In doing so, Yang foregrounds the threat of mortality that attempts to stabilise identity politics for the ‘nation’. In the age of global media Yang resists multi-modal approaches to his medium to reclaim the theatrical space of narration. As a consequence, Yang’s Sadness affords an opportunity to rethink the imperatives intrinsic to the classification of social subjects in terms of racial, sexual and reproductive practices, and the relationship of the citizen-body to modes of cultural representation.