Sex in Public

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?