“他無法面對身體”：東尼、克許納劇作《美國天使》中的肉體顛覆

<p>東尼、克許納的普立茲得獎作品《美國天使，國家議題的同志幻想》探討同性戀、宗教、政治、同志恐懼症、和身份等重大議題，亦激發意識型態、畏懼、及焦慮等種種意見衝突。然而，探討本劇的學術研究，無論為關於政治、宗教、或文化的意識型態戰爭，都不經意地透露出某方面的忽略或迴避──肉體。肉體在本劇中不僅舉足輕重且一再地帶給觀眾深痛的衝擊。《美國天使》中無所不在的肉體展現，尤其是感染愛滋病的男同志病體，在在證實了劇中具強烈身體感官的言語、意象、和行動的重要性。本文深究《美國天使》中運用肉體的意識型態和䇿略意涵，並論述克許納將肉體政治化，透過展現怪誕醜陋的男同志愛滋病體、疾病敍述、及性暴露的方式，為男同性戀者和愛滋病患爭取平權，並激發同情心與善解的人性光輝。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992) brings ponderous issues such as homosexuality, religion, politics, homophobia, and identity together in a fascinating and profound clash of warring beliefs, ideologies, fears, and anxiety. However, the plethora of scholarship which the play has inspired on the wars of ideology, be they political, religious, or cultural, has betrayed an unwitting negligence or avoidance in one regard&mdash;corporeality, which not only abounds in the play but also insistently makes poignant impressions on the audience. The pervasiveness of corporeality in Angels in America, specifically the AIDS-infected male homosexual body, attests to the centrality of visceral language, imagery, and action in the play. This study delves into the ideological and strategic implications of corporeality in Angels in America and postulates that Kushner politicizes corporeality to strive for equity for homosexual males and AIDS patients and to inspire sympathy and understanding humanity through the AIDS-infected male homosexual grotesquery, illness narratives, and sexual explicitness.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Det syge USA

Acknowledging the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic as an exacerbating factor for precarious US communities, this article reads Tony Kushner’s critically acclaimed play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992-95) and Michael Henson’s collection of short stories Maggie Boylan (2015) alongside Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor), Jasbir Puar (The Right to Maim) and Lauren Berlant (“Slow Death”). The play and the short story collection represent examples of critiques of a deep-rooted disorder that characterizes the precaritizing American social and political system. From the severely mishandled AIDS crisis in Reagan’s conservative United States to the equally disastrous management of the opioid and meth epidemics in the 21st century, American society and politicians are failing their citizens, a failure reflected in and critiqued by literary texts. Whereas Angels in America is an overtly political drama, in which marginalized people come together to respond to political erasure and violence with imaginative countercultural utopianism, Maggie Boylan traces the gradual decay and corruption of a contemporary American community, functioning as a microcosm of the Unites States as a whole. This society is plagued by several crippling “epidemics” and “crises” that leave bodies broken and communities in tatters. Despite glimmers of hope, Kushner and Henson paint a grim picture of a sickness at the core of American society.

Practising disease and its imaginarium functioning in society, via the example of the play Angels in America directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski

The text discusses issues related to the practice of physical and mental illnesses. It also analyses society’s perception of illness itself, which is oft en imposed by the media. Selected themes and attitudes shown in the play Angels in America, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, are the essential core of this text and present the phenomenon I am discussing. The category of stigma formulated by Erving Goff man is an important aspect of the problems explored in the article. Other signifi cant issues analysed in the text are: the problem of disruption of the relationship of non-normative or diseased individuals with the rest of society, the issue of rejection, the feeling of loneliness and isolation in especially prepared spaces.

Plague Time (Again)

This essay probes literary representations of pandemic temporalities to argue that plague reshapes our sense and experience of time in specific ways: It opens contact with the epidemic past to restructure historical understanding and attendant forms of identity; it promotes utopian or cosmopolitan fantasies of shared vulnerability and future inoculation; it marks survivors with a kind of zombie consciousness in an unending, limitless present. Drawing on American works from Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) to Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992–95), this essay situates their discussions of plague time within broader traditions stretching from Thucydides to Daniel Defoe to Albert Camus.

‘If we Can’t Have a Conversation with our Past, then What will be Our Future?’: HIV/AIDS, Queer Generationalism, and Utopian Performatives in Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance

As the HIV/AIDS epidemic approaches its fifth decade, and emerging generations of queer-identified youth experience and conceptualize the virus in new ways, questions surrounding the memorialization and historicization of queer history have arisen within the arts. In the domain of theatre in particular, as mainstream revivals of crisis-era plays such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) proliferate, criticisms have arisen that such revivals feed into a narrative of the so-called ‘AIDS nostalgia’, pushing the idea that HIV/AIDS is a thing of the past and ignoring the ways in which the virus continues to shape individual social and sexual experiences. Recently, however, new plays such as Jonathan Harvey’s Canary (2010), the GHP Collective’s The Gay Heritage Project (2013), and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018) have explicitly addressed this issue, conceptualizing a revised queer politics of HIV/AIDS that transcends Angels’ famous call for ‘The Great Work’ to begin. This article explores how The Inheritance in particular problematizes ‘AIDS nostalgia’ and configures novel approaches to the politics of HIV/AIDS in the twenty-first century. Alongside scholarship within the field of queer utopian studies such as José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) and Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005), it analyses the ways in which Lopez’s play employs utopian performatives to move towards a new politics of queer heritage.