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Psychodrama: Hypertheatricality and Sexual Excess on the Gothic Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2003
Abstract
Gothic drama deals obsessively with the spectacle of pale, broken and effectively castrated masculinity. The scopic epistemology of gothic drama insists that the emaciated male form be fetishized as the lost paternal origin of the dramatic action and the source of psychological dread. These plays embrace ‘unnatural absurdity’ as a way of breaking through the complacency of bourgeois ideology and challenging sexual normativity with the spectacle of sexual excess. The resulting ‘sensationalism’ begins to suggest a revolution in the coding and decoding of sexual identities, just at the moment when such identities are being produced for the purposes of wholesale cultural labelling, as well as to articulate theatricalized resistance to the normative dictates that those identities presuppose.
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- © 2003 International Federation for Theatre Research
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