Staging Discomfort examines how queer bodies are theatrically represented on the Cuban stage in order to re-evaluate the role of categorization as one of the state’s primary revolutionary tools. These performances concentrate on an aesthetics of fluidity, and thus upset traditional understandings of performer and spectator, and what constitutes the ideal Cuban citizenry. New affective modes are produced when performing bodies highlight—often in uncomfortably intimate, grotesque, or raw ways—the unavoidability of spectators’ bodies, and their capacity for queerness. Here the imagining of new continuities and subjectivities can lead to a reconfiguration of forms of Cuban citizenship. The affective responses from the closeness experienced in the performances in Staging Discomfort are challenges to the Cuban state’s self-designated role as primary provider for the needs of its citizens’ bodies. Through the lens of queer theory, the manuscript explores the body’s centrality to the state’s deployment of fear to successfully marginalize gay life, which this group of works seeks to defuse through an articulation of intimacies, shame, the death drive, cruising, and failure. These affective experiences shape Cuban subjectivities that emerge out of queerness, but whose focus on inclusivity necessarily involves all Cubans. Several of the central questions that guide Staging Discomfort are: How is Cuban theater agile in its critiques considering the state’s limitations on expression? How do queer performances allow for new understandings about the effects of the state’s failing socialist utopian contract with its citizens? And, can Cuban bodies that come together in queer ways re-imagine Cuban citizenship?
Children’s Experiences of Their Journey to School: Integrating Behaviour Change Frameworks to Inform the Role of the Built Environment in Active School Travel Promotion
