Performing Queer Biography

Performing Queer Biography
Topics
THEA-UT 801.001
Date and Time: Tuesdays 2:00-4:45
Professor Gwendolyn Alker
ga41@nyu.edu

Biographies about artists’ lives has conventionally been conceptualized as a matter of objective fact. But what happens when the biographical subject resists traditional structures of time, coherence, or linearity? What happens when sanctioned methods of archival recovery fail to produce meaningful information about a life? “Queer Biography,” a phrase first coined by Wendy Moffat in her 2010 biography of E. M. Forster, reimagine biographical writing and research methodologies, resonating with José Muñoz’s queer utopianism in the field of Performance Studies. Beginning with Professor Alker’s forthcoming book on María Irene Fornés, Fornés and Her Friends: The Making of the Maestra of the American Theatre and continuing with studies of other major theatrical and literary figures, including Imani Perry on Lorraine Hansberry, Nicholas Briggs on James Baldwin, Jenn Shapland on Carson McCullers, and C. Carr on Candy Darling. Students in this course will read ground-breaking biographies alongside plays by their subjects, including Fefu and Her Friends, A Raisin in the Sun, The Amen Corner, and The Ballad of the Sad Café. Our engagement with these plays will be augmented and deepened with readings from the field of queer theory including by Eve Sedgewick, Muñoz, Theresa de Lauretis and others. Moving between genres, the course asks how writing about performance—and writing as performance—can restage the encounter between an author and their subject, challenging inherited assumptions about evidence, authorship, and historical truth.