Marriage and Other Unexpected Parties: Queer Joy in Modern Shakespeare Adaptation

• Isabella Lam, English, University of Delaware

• Miranda Wilson, English, University of Delaware
• Julian Yates, English, University of Delaware
• Davis Knittle, English, University of Delaware

Despite Shakespeare’s reputation as a stalwart of the theatrical canon, his plays have long provided fertile ground for experimentation and social commentary.  When the field of queer studies emerged in the 1990s, Shakespeare’s plays – often featuring characters with divergent or contradictory desires, expressions of gender, and relationships with their identities – intrigued critics and theater companies alike.  With their broad appeal among the public, performances of Shakespeare have the potential to expand audiences’ understandings of sexuality, gender, identity, and expression.  At the same time, those performances (as well as the art we make together in general) illuminate and shape how we envision, and perhaps limit, our lives today.

“Marriage and Other Unexpected Parties: Queer Joy in Modern Shakespeare Adaptation”, explores an often overlooked aspect of queer life in popular media: joy.  In this presentation, I trace the development of the terms “queer” and “queer joy” in both academic discourse and the LGBTQ+ community that rose up around HIV/AIDS activism and the broader gay rights movement.  This provides a concrete framework for identifying queerness.  I then use theories of marginalized joy and queer performance – with a particular focus on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of utopia – to identify moments of queer joy in contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. This work lays the theoretical foundation for my senior thesis project, which will focus on integrating diverse expressions of queer joy on stage and revealing how queer joy in Shakespeare can broaden our imaginations of queer life.