| "Glorying Boy Holes: Masculinity, Submission, and the Performativity of Identity in Coriolanus" traces the construction and fracturing of Coriolanus' identity across the play and scrutinizes how a homoerotic ethos plays upon that identity. The project considers Coriolanus by staging the intersection of queer theory and Renaissance drama: what kind of structuring gender and sexual framework governs the play? How may we position Coriolanus within the queer terrain of either queer theory or Shakespearean tragedy? How can we conceptualize Shakespearean tragedy in relation to historical notions of identity? The thesis looks at the way Coriolanus' identity is built across three imbricated spaces: the battlefield, the Roman republic, and the theatrical space of performance that frames the intradiegetic fields. The first chapter, "Boy of Tears," centers upon Coriolanus as a warrior upon the battlefield and concerns itself with the queer erotics of war---erotics framed around the absenting of heteronormative structures and the production of a field which celebrates bondage, discipline, and sado-masochism (BDSM) and the male body, multiply penetrated and riddled with (boy) holes. The second chapter, "Terminator Tableaux," draws back from the battlefield to Rome and questions the way Rome represents Coriolanus as a hero---or, rather, a superhero bound to the republic and yet constantly in excess of it, both superhuman and subhuman, god and cyborg. The final chapter, "Cracked Actor," considers the landscape of Coriolanus as a textual and theatrical one: it problematizes both Austinian and Derridean notions of performativity by arguing that Coriolanus' self-reflexive awareness of itself as a diegesis collapses performance into performativity. This collapse produces Coriolanus as an actor cracked in his very production. The chapter pursues notions of textuality that fix around the text of the script---and who, ultimately, can claim authorship of the script of Coriolanus itself. |
