Subverting the “Heterosexual Matrix”: Gender, Sexuality and Empowerment in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America

Abstract

Throughout history, the relegation of certain nations, people, minds, and minority groups has been perceived as necessary by those in power in order to secure dominance. This dominance has created many subjugated groups positioned at the margin of their respective societies. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner engages himself in a project of resistance to long-standing gender stereotypes and exposes the allocations of power those stereotypes legitimate. Battling against normative heterosexuality, which retains its centrality in the American canon, Kushner explicitly foregrounds the daily tribulations of many gay characters attempting to make sense of the world in the mid 1980’s. In his play, Kushner seeks to place gay men at the center of American history by acknowledging the pivotal role they had in the construction of “a national subject, polity, literature and theatre” 1 . Significantly, gay men are depicted as figures who establish identities that disempower the heterosexual hegemony and those who propagate it. This paper seeks to show how Kushner subverts the “heterosexual matrix” by suggesting a discourse that aims at blurring the dominant heteronormative sexual boundaries that perceive heterosexuality as the “norm” and homosexuality as it’s opposite. The present study also seeks to articulate Kushner’s adoption of Brechtian tenets as an attempt to induce social awareness of gay male oppression and provoke the audience to adopt counter oppressive stances.