The Plays of David Henry Hwang: Queer Aesthetics, Selves, Cultures

This dissertation traces queer aesthetics—the aesthetic expressions and sensations that queer or refuse essentialized perceptions of selves—in David Henry Hwang’s works. From 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988) to the revival of M. Butterfly (2017), the Chinese-American playwright continually experiments with boundaries of gender, race, and human identities in a multicultural and multiracial American society. In his works, he reflects on the socially and historically constructive nature of normative identity categories and probes the possibilities of going beyond their confinement.
The dissertation’s deployment of queer aesthetics, an artistic approach yet to be theorized comprehensively, draws from studies on camp aesthetics and sadomasochism, Judith Halberstam’s work on transgender aesthetics, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s discussion of a queer utopian aesthetic dimension, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. The dissertation examines queer selves and aesthetics manifested in Hwang’s works from the 1980s to the late 2010s.
I delve into three separate yet interrelated sites of queerness in Hwang’s writing. In the first site, gender and sexuality, I look at the deviant sexual eroticisms and subversion of gender norms portrayed in Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988) and its following adaptations. The second section focuses on the field of race—how the notion is problematized and dismantled by the playwright’s Millennium fantasy on racial fluidity in Bondage (1992) and Yellow Face (2007). The last dimension concerns the queer potential of human corporeality and the becoming in/human bodies expressed through queer sounds in Hwang’s The Sound of a Voice (1983) and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988). The transformative gender expressions, camp sensations, and futuristic queer imaginations of subjectivities, desires, and bodies in these works, I argue, allow dialogues and permeation between the “self” and the “other” and evoke a queer aesthetic sensibility.