ABSTRACT
In Chapter One, “Performing Rhetorical Theory,” Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch introduces the book’s central claim: that live theater concerned with the material effects of human communication enacts the potential of transgressive bodies to disrupt the normative discourses that constitute those bodies. On the stage, the body is rhetorical theory. Jumping off from Kenneth Burke’s concept of rhetorical identification, this chapter introduces the book’s methodological and theoretical focus—a unique combination of theater, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Judith Butler’s theories of performativity—which encompass what that author terms Critical Discourse Perspectives (CDP). The chapter then introduces the theater of Harvey Firestein, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, Amiri Baraka, David Henry Hwang, and John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, which, following 4th century Greek comic Aristophanes’ template for embodied rhetorical theorizing, performs CDP; these plays enact, interrogate, and reconfigure marginalizing language about those not often given the spotlight in public and political spheres.
