2024 CARL WEBER MEMORIAL LECTURE + SEMINAR
with SPECIAL GUEST PATRICIA YBARRA
Brown University MacMillan Family Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
ABOUT PATRICIA YBARRA
Patricia Ybarra (she/her) is the MacMillan Family Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Michigan, 2009), co-editor with Lara Nielsen of Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; paperback 2015), and Latinx Theatre in Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a digital humanities project on queer Iranian American director Reza Abdoh’s Father Was a Peculiar Man and a monograph, Theatrical Retrospeculation: Reza Abdoh’s Queer Theory (under contract with University of Michigan Press). She is a former President of ATHE, a former department chair, and the recipient of Brown’s graduate mentoring award.
PUBLIC LECTURE
THU APR 04 at 6-7:30PM
HARRY J. ELAM, JR. THEATER in ROBLE GYM
FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC
“Quietly, Death Becomes a Commodity: Reza Abdoh’s Queer Theatre of Public Health”
Parallel with the development of queer theory and intersectionality within academia, Reza Abdoh (with collaborator Mira-Lani Obglesby) explored the violent asymmetries of access to health care theatrically through a series of works including Minimata (1989), Bogeyman (1991), and Law of Remains (1991/2). These performances combined critiques of the necropolitics of the AIDS crisis in the U.S. within rather than as exception to large-scale biomedical destruction of global subjects under advanced capitalism, suturing his play Minimata (about mercury poisoning in Japan) to his later AIDS plays. While not sidestepping the particularities of U.S. based homophobia, Abdoh reveals that these necropolitical capitalist violences are deeply intermingled, imperiling queers, people of the global majority and non-human animals alike. This paper argues that these works also form a theatrical theory of public health that also consciously rebukes the mainstream theatrical dramaturgy of AIDS and its ideological base in U.S. political liberalism.
DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
FRI APR 05 at NOON-1:30PM
ROBLE GYM LOUNGE
OPEN to STANFORD STUDENTS, FACULTY, and STAFF
“Reza Abdoh, Transfeminism and Brownness”
In this seminar, participants will explore how Abdoh’s non-Black brownness as an HIV positive male Iranian conditioned his racial politics, his gender politics, and his particular mode of queerness, including his critical performative expression of whiteness on stage. Ybarra will frame these interventions in relation to Latine/American queer theory, namely that of Sayak Valencia’s transfeminism (Gore Capitalism) and José Muñoz’s conception of “A Sense of Brown”.
REQUIRED PRE-READING/VIEWING
Must be logged in via an @stanford.edu account to view
— Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, Warning and Chapter 5 and notes
— Tavia Nyong’o and Joshua Chambers-Letson, “Editors introduction” to José Muñoz’s Sense of Brown and notes
— José Muñoz, Sense of Brown, Chapter 12 (“The Sense of Wildness”) and notes
OPTIONAL ITEMS FOR REVIEW
— Father Was a Peculiar Man Film: https://vimeo.com/826188429/fe782868e0
— Patricia Ybarra, “From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology:Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Eschatology”