Staging Gender in Latin America

Catalog description

This course is based on an understanding of theater as a social space and a cultural practice that allows a collectivity--in its most concrete sense, the audience--to think in public about itself and about the fundamental forces facing and shaping it. In this course, we will mainly read contemporary Latin American and Latinx theatrical texts produced by women and queer authors. Our focus will be to discuss how, in the last approximately four decades, the stage as space and performance as practice have been used in Latin America as vehicles to represent and discuss issues related to gender and sexuality, to reconfigure the parameters of these debates, to examine and question existing social structures and attitudes, to propose and rehearse alternative solutions to the problems faced by marginalized subjects, and overall to explore the transformative capabilities of theater. We will also examine how conceptions and representations of gender and sexuality intersect with other identitarian coordinates, such as race, class, and nationality.