ABSTRACT
Chapter Three: “I I I is for Ideology: Staging Metaphor in Torch Song and Angels in America,” draws from Judith Butler’s union of performativity and precarity, and offers a contemporary demonstration of Aristophanes’ model of rhetoric-in-action. As an example of performed Critical Discourse Perspectives (CDP), this chapter first examine Harvey Fierstein’s metaphorization of the gay body as sickness in Torch Song, and, second, demonstrates how Kushner’s characters in Angels in America further embody and negotiate the politically and biblically charged metaphors in AIDS discourse employed during the Reagan administration. This chapter features blocking notes and emails to the cast of Angels in America, during the first professional production of the play in Idaho, as well as accounts from the recent National Theatre production on Broadway, to demonstrate how Angels broadens and deepens Torch Song’s enactment of marginalizing metaphors. Following the Aristophanic model, Fierstein and Kushner’s characters first embody these crushing metaphors, but then Kushner’s dramatic rhetoric re-signifies both the gay community and AIDS beyond the limits of heteronormativity, as well as the language of the Right-wing, political and Christian elite.
