Sex in Public
by Lillian G Lippold
Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer and Gallatin student studying Fragmentary Poetics & Death Studies while minoring in Performance Studies. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in many university pubs and other mags. Their writing and academic interests focus on fragmentary literary/performance modes and how they’re used to reflect and inflect mass methods of how we mourn intracultural/intercultural disaster. Their work takes up Trans theories of writing and time, the figure of the solitary writer, critical phenomenology, Affect theory, and the craft of writing by different personal and political time signatures. They’re focused heavily on counterculture artforms (such as zine-making or underground spoken word) and radical uses of genre (Trans SciFi, AI memoir, apocalyptic nature writing, etc.). They definitely love you, too.
Sex in Public by Lilian G Lippold
After assigning D. Soyini Madison’s “Performing Theory/Embodied Writing,” Professor Sansonetti asked us each to write a short play that “performed” a critical theory text in the same way. For me, the first text to come to mind was “Sex in Public,” written by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, a seminal text in queer theory that I encountered in an English department course on obscenity.
In my short play, I aimed to expand Berlant and Warner’s theory, respecting their work on the private/public divide but more radically imagining this notion of public. By setting my play in a placeless place—that of space, a place we cannot recognise—and allowing my characters to be detached from binary gender, “Sex in Public,” the play, is a rebellion against the very academic, reasonable framework it exists within. The play is entirely unreasonable, unfocused on the logistical workings of its own world, but deeply interested in a space of nonsense. How do nonsense and non-place open onto more “true” and direct communion within and between collectives? And how is the public implicated in all of this, a public of a thousand eyes, blinking and winking along to the tune of communal care?