Museum, furniture, men:the Queer ecology of I Am My Own Wife

Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife attempts to stage the life of a unique trans woman, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who lived through Nazi occupation and Communist-era Berlin, during which time she built and maintained a beloved collection of antiques. This article will suggest that Charlotte’s queerness might be found not only in her trans status but also in her remarkable relationship with the objects of her collection. Charlotte’s privileging of the objects in her life seems to disrupt ontological hierarchies at the same time as she disrupts gender categories. Object-oriented ontology – the radically non-anthropocentric shift made visible via Charlotte’s performance – manifests as a queer ecology in the play, one with implications for how we understand the ecological place of the human in the world. </jats:p

The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

In their sparse and isolated spaces, Samuel Beckett's figures imagine the touch of a lost love or dream of the comfort and care that the hands of a dear one might bring. Applying philosophical writings that feature sensation, particularly touch, this study examines how Beckett's later work for stage and screen dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other. With implications for how gender and ethics can be approached within Beckett's aesthetic, this study explores the employment of haptic imagery as an alternative to certain dominant codes of visual representation