6 - Racing sexualities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
The previous chapter has already – within the context of the theatrical representation of arranged marriages – provided an account of the particular heteronormative sexual politics that emerge in some contemporary plays by Asian women playwrights. Simultaneously with the emergence of an interrogation of that sexual politics in Asian playwrights’ work, Asian and Black women playwrights have begun to write about divergent forms of sexuality and thus to challenge heteronormativity both within and across cultures. Given the histories of domination and submission, exploitation and subjugation which inform Britain's colonial past and which are articulated through the racism that permeates its present, all sexualities, including heterosexuality, are racialized as part of the complex interplay of sex, race, and gender as they are articulated in British society. This racialization acquires a specific poignancy when divergent sexualities are at stake. As Sagri Dhairyam puts it: ‘the developmental telos of my journey from not-lesbian to lesbian is simultaneously an ironic journey from Indian and silent otherness to Western and articulated subjectivity’ (1994: 26). In this chapter I shall therefore focus in the main on two plays, both by mixed-race British women playwrights, that emerged at two very different moments of lesbian and of black politics. Jackie Kay's ‘Chiaroscuro’ (1985; published 1987) is rooted in pre-Clause 28, pre-queer days and predates theories of performance/performativity. It projects the difficulties of lesbian closetedness and invisibility in an interrogation of racialized visibilities and the politics of female friendship.
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- Information
- Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain , pp. 170 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003