The Stage as a Community Possibility and a Space of Resistance: A Study on Pose

Abstract

It is possible to read Pose (Ryan Murphy, 2018), which brings together different human profiles belonging to intersectional identities, as a defense of singularity that rebels against identity politics and directly the issue of identity, beyond being a fiction about American ball culture. The always marginalized characters in Pose find an opportunity for liberation on prom nights, where they can only be together by disguising, putting on makeup, dancing and posing. This opportunity for liberation is also their opportunity to reconstruct the truth about who they are. The purpose of this study is to evaluate Pose as a project shaped around the problem of identity and singularity, a proposition about how people under domination can establish their own singularity and how they can become a community. For this purpose, in the first part of the study, Pose's organic connection with the identity and subject problem was examined, and the mechanisms of domination (for example, institutions and cultural norms) that were clearly revealed in the series were analyzed in the context of discourse practices theorized by Foucault. In addition, the AIDS epidemic emphasized in the series and the way the epidemic was defined by the dominant institutions were analyzed. In the second part, the process of transforming people who are dominated in Pose into a community and the role of death in this process are examined within the framework of the ideas put forward by some thinkers such as Nancy and Blanchot. In the third part, Agamben's views on community and political exceptions and homo sacer terminology are evaluated through Pose. It has been concluded that Pose has a very rich fiction in terms of identity and community theories, and that the gesture of posing, which is frequently mentioned in this fiction, reveals the theme of "being with others through self-expression", and that both the singularity and the community are a part of the stage, which has become a field of resistance and reconstructed as a counter-stance.