The Other Tennessee: Staging Queer Counterpublics at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival (original) (raw)

Abstract

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This paper examines the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival as a significant cultural event that offers a platform for queer counterpublics. By situating the festival within the historical context of Provincetown's acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals, it highlights how Tennessee Williams' work and legacy resonate within contemporary queer performances. The authors analyze various themes presented at the festival, exploring how they contribute to the ongoing conversations around identity and representation in theater.

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References (30)

  1. The 2022 exhibit was favorably reviewed in the Cape Cod Times: https://www.capecod- times.com/story/entertainment/2022/09/08/provincetown-century-lgbtq-history-reveal-museum-ex- hibit-pilgrim-monument-tolerance-open-hat-sister/7854248001/.
  2. David Kaplan, Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (East Brunswick NJ: Hansen Publish- ing Group, 2006).
  3. Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, "About," https://www.twptown.org/ mission.
  4. Judith Butler, "Gender Is Burning," in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993), 84.
  5. Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón K. Rivera-Servera, eds., Queer Nightlife (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 8.
  6. See Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
  7. Jen Jack Gieseking, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (New York: NYU Press, 2020);
  8. Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (New York: NYU Press, 2022);
  9. Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle, Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives (New York: NYU Press, 2021)
  10. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
  11. See Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: Rout- ledge, 2006), 150-87.
  12. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547-66. 12. For a list of events, see https://ptownchamber.com/calendar-of-events/lgbt-events/.
  13. Sandra L. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer: Paradoxes of 'Identity, Space, and Place,'" Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 7, no. 3 (2009): 206.
  14. Karen Christel Krahulik, "Cape Queer? A Case Study of Provincetown, Massachusetts," Journal of Homosexuality 52, no. 1/2 (2006): 197. 15. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer," 208.
  15. Krahulik, "Cape Queer?" 200.
  16. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer," 212.
  17. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer," 212; Early Hinton, "Understanding the Diversity of Provincetown: A Socio-Demographic View by the Numbers," January 2023, www.provincetown-ma. gov/DocumentCenter/View/16011/PT-Sociodemographics-2023-v0107-1?bidId=.
  18. Krahulik, "Cape Queer?" 202.
  19. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer," 205.
  20. Josh Keefe, "Gov. Bill Lee Will Sign Drag Bill, Reacts to Yearbook Photo Showing Him Dressed as a Woman," Tennessean, February 27, 2023, https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/poli- tics/2023/02/27/tennessee-drag-bill-lee-to-sign-law-reacts-yearbook-photo/69951107007/.
  21. Kaplan, Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, 31.
  22. Faiman-Silva, "Provincetown Queer," 209.
  23. Email communication from David Kaplan to Bess Rowen, October 23, 2023.
  24. Marybeth Hamilton, "Mae West Live: Sex, the Drag, and 1920s Broadway," TDR 36, no. 4 (1992): 84.
  25. Hamilton, "Mae West Live," 84.
  26. John Houchin, Censorship in the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 95.
  27. For more on Mae West, see Lillian Schissel's introduction to Three Plays by Mae West (London: Routledge, 1997).
  28. David W. Dunlap, "161 Commercial Street," Building Provincetown 2020. https://build- ingprovincetown2020.org/161-commercial-street-3/. Email between Dunlap and Leonard Paoletti, 9 April 2014 and 30 June 2014.
  29. The other two "Big Three" plays are The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
  30. Tennessee Williams, "The Mutilated," in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 7 (New York: New Directions, 1981), 81. This is also the subtitle of Annette Saddik's book, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).