De bruits et de fureurs : excès queer du théâtre d’Abdoh

Abstract

In the 1990s, American theater appeared to have engendered major “epistemological trouble” when it came into close contact with queer practice and theory. Reza Abdoh’s theater work erupted into what is the closure of representation. His queering of performance reasserts the disruptive values of the production process taking place on stage. By focusing on excess, violence, proliferation, and fragmentation, this queer Iranian-American playwright and director questions the notion of the subject ’s stable identity. Abdoh ’s art thwarts reification and ventures into the unfathomable at the price of facing death and destruction. Queer performance thus acts out an epistemological slippage across the stage and through the vacillating actor ’s bodies. It formulates drama as an exploration of uncharted territories across and between the fields of politics and esthetics.