Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat

Abstract

appears amid discussions of the common use of the term “bourgeois” as a pejorative in contemporary (bourgeois) culture. Disidentification thus describes the author’s (and perhaps reader’s) own sense of their relationship to the term “bourgeois.” In subsequent chapters we find that the figure of disidentification may in fact be intrinsic to theatre (insofar as the use of theatre as a machine of ideological reproduction is prone to failure) (73), and implicit in the emergence of the trunkmaker and related figures (137). It serves as a marker of ideal subjects of capitalism (154), but also as one way to escape interpellation as such an ideal subject (177). Disidentification is innate to bourgeois subjectivity insofar as it reiterates the distance at the center of that subjectivity, but it might also be cultivated to encourage more bourgeois subjects to resist interpellation as good subjects of capitalism. Surprisingly, the book does not directly engage with other approaches to disidentification in performance studies, especially José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) which offers a theory of precisely some of those subjectivities the author frets he may be excluding by extrapolating from his own subjectivity. The absence is hardly fatal and points to ways in which Scenes from Bourgeois Life will have a significant impact on conversations across the disciplines of theatre and performance studies. Scenes from Bourgeois Life provides an account of the historically contingent mode of spectatorship that remains dominant today, an account that must be reckoned with by any effort to theorize the capacity of theatre to make political subjects, to impact its audiences, or to play a role in addressing the oppressions it so often depicts.