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The House of Hecuba: Tragic/Queer Disidentifications of Colour and the Siege of AIDS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2025
Abstract
This article explores the 2017 performance of Harrison David Rivers's play, And She Would Stand Like This, and its dramatization of the intersectional marginalization and discrimination endured by a queer family of colour facing AIDS, through the framework of Euripides’ Trojan Women. It does so via three main perspectives: chosen family, normative discriminations and tragic disidentifications. In its changes to the tragic plot, the play reflects on AIDS, exploring criminal infection; hetero-/homosexual, genetic and communitarian HIV transmission; and bereavement. It critiques the offstage intersectional systems of oppression and shifts the status of the community from victimhood to survival, and from the representational periphery to the cultural centre. And She Would Stand Like This appears as a queer communal ritual of poetic empowerment with/through which to pay homage to queer forebears of colour, to celebrate queer lives of colour now and to galvanize those who are to walk a queer futurity of power and liberation.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Federation for Theatre Research
Footnotes
1
The research for this article was funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, as part of the Queer Tragedy project, hosted at the University of Reading. This article's Gold Open Access agreement and the images' publication fee were generously funded by Durham University. I am grateful for the attentive eyes of Patrice Rankine and Tom Sapsford and for the support of Barbara Goff.
References
Notes
2 And She Would Stand Like This has also been staged by the Antipodes Theatre Company, as directed by Margot Tanjutco, at the Meat Market Stables (Melbourne, Australia), 3–12 February 2022.
3 For an overall view of the film, production and debates around it see Hilderbrand, Lucas, Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
4 On intersectionality see e.g. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (New York: The New Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Collins, Patricia Hill and Bilge, Silma, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020)Google Scholar. For its application in queer studies see e.g. Cohen, Cathy J., ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’, GLQ, 3, 4 (May 1997) pp. 437–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, E. Patrick, 2001. ‘“Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 21, 1 (2001), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hills Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, p. 49. For AIDS in queer communities of colour see e.g. Cohen, Cathy J., The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Cathy J., ‘Contested Membership: Black Gay Identities and the Politics of AIDS’, in Corber, Robert J. and Valocchi, Stephen M., eds., Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 46–60Google Scholar; Román, David, ‘NOT-ABOUT-AIDS’, GLQ, 6, 1 (January 2000), pp. 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Royles, Dan, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in theatre see Román, David, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
5 For an introduction to Trojan Women see e.g. Goff, Barbara, Euripides: Trojan Women (London: Duckworth, 2009)Google Scholar. For a queer reading of the tragedy see Freccero, Carla, ‘Trojan Women – No Futures’, in Telò, Mario and Olsen, Sarah, eds., Queer Euripides: Re-readings in Greek Tragedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), pp. 43–50Google Scholar.
6 Bailey, Marlon M., Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 For ballroom culture see e.g. ibid.
8 For a reflection on kinship with and through Greek tragedy see Judith Butler, Breaks in the Bond: Reflections on Kinship Trouble (London: University College London, 2017).
9 Cunningham, Michael, ‘The Slap of Love’, Open City, 6 (1998) pp. 175–95Google Scholar.
10 And She Would Stand Like This (hereafter ASWSLT), p. 21. Quotes are verbatim from the script provided to me by Harrison Rivers, from where all page numbers also originate.
11 ASWSLT, p. 22.
12 ASWSLT, p. 24.
13 ASWSLT, p. 37.
14 ASWSLT, p. 38.
15 ASWSLT, p. 39.
16 ASWSLT, p. 40.
17 Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps, p. 107.
18 ASWSLT, p. 56.
19 All line numbers and translations relating to Euripides's Trojan Women are from Euripides, The Trojan Women and Other Plays, trans. James Morwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
20 ASWSLT, p. 16.
21 ASWSLT, p. 16.
22 ASWSLT, p. 16.
23 ASWSLT, p. 17.
24 ASWSLT, p. 17.
25 See e.g. Royles, To Make the Wounded Whole; Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; and Cohen, ‘Contested Membership’.
26 ASWSLT, p. 7.
27 ASWSLT, p. 13.
28 ASWSLT, p. 28.
29 This is an interesting adaptation to the AIDS epidemic of Andromache's insistence on her own virginity and faithfulness to Hector, to be broken by her kidnapping by Neoptolemus (645–83). It may even be pointing to Hector being on the down-low himself.
30 ASWSLT, p. 28.
31 ASWSLT, p. 30.
32 ASWSLT, pp. 69–70.
33 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, p. 7.
34 Cohen, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens’, p. 446.
35 ASWSLT, p. 9.
36 As the author, Harrison David Rivers, explained to me in an interview, Talthybius was at one point conceived as the only white character onstage.
37 ASWSLT, p. 32.
38 ASWSLT, p. 33.
39 ASWSLT, p. 34.
40 ASWSLT, p. 49.
41 ASWSLT, pp. 11–12, 34–5.
42 ASWSLT, p. 49.
43 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, p. 9.
44 ASWSLT, p. 44.
45 ASWSLT, p. 45.
46 The Movement Theatre Company acknowledged the potential financial limitations of its audience and reserved fifteen tickets per show as pay-what-you-can. Broadway World, 27 July 2017.
47 See e.g. Royles, To Make the Wounded Whole.
48 Cohen, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens’, p. 437.
49 For a discussion on this and Cooper's quote see Román, ‘NOT-ABOUT-AIDS’, pp. 6–7.
50 ASWSLT, pp. 68–9.
51 Hill Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, p. 12.
52 ASWSLT, p. 44.
53 ASWSLT, p. 47.
54 On the racial aggravations of transphobia see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
55 ASWSLT, pp. 60–1.
56 ASWSLT, p. 61.
57 ASWSLT, p. 62.
58 ASWSLT, p. 56.
59 I use the split name to mark the gender duality of Honesto/Helen in the play, and not as a mark of gender identity, which the play leaves ambiguous.
60 ASWSLT, p. 59.
61 William G. Hawkeswood, One of the Children: Gay Black Men in Harlem, ed. Alex W. Costley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 169–83.
62 Royles, To Make the Wounded Whole, pp. 20–2.
63 ASWSLT, p. 64.
64 ASWSLT, pp. 65–7.
65 Another angle of intervention into tragedy that may be fruitful to remember, but for which there is no scope or much relevance here, is that afforded by postdramatic theatre, as explored in Emma K. Cole, Postdramatic Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 390–450.
66 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 11.
67 See e.g. Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993); Amy Richlin, ‘Eros Underground: Greece and Rome in Gay Print Culture, 1953–65’, Journal of Homosexuality, 49, 3–4 (2005), pp. 421–61; Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, eds., Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jenifer Ingleheart, ed., Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Thomas E. Jenkins, Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 33–92.
68 See e.g. Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 47–67.
69 Jih-Fei Cheng, ‘How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media’, WSQ, 44, 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2016), pp. 73–99; Cheng, ‘AIDS, Black Feminisms, and the Institutionalization of Queer Politics’, GLQ, 25, 1 (January 2019), pp. 169–77.
70 Despite this larger phenomenon, there has been a plethora of black queer responses to AIDS onstage, even if it has enjoyed a more discreet critical reception. For a discussion of these see Román, Acts of Intervention, pp. 154–76; Román, ‘NOT-ABOUT-AIDS’; and Çağdaş Duman, ‘Revisiting HIV/AIDS Theatre: Black and Queer Spatio-temporalities in Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home’, Modern Drama, 66, 1 (2023), pp. 71–90.
71 For queer stagings of Graeco-Roman tragedy see e.g. Oliver Baldwin, ‘Medea Is a Good Boy: Performing, Subverting, and Unmasking Tragic Gender’, Classical Receptions Journal, 12, 4 (October 2020), pp. 486–501; Sean Edgecomb, ‘“Not Just Any Woman”: Bradford Louryk, a Legacy of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatre for the Twenty-First Century’, in James Fisher, ed., ‘We Will be Citizens’: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Theatre (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2008), pp. 56–78; Helene P. Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Sabrina Hamilton, ‘Split Britches and the Alcestis Lesson: “What Is This Albatross?”’, in Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, eds., Upstaging Big Daddy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 133–49; Melinda Powers, Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
72 See Muñoz, Disidentifications, pp. 25–31.
73 And She Would Stand Like This, rehearsal interview with Julianne ‘Mizz June’ Brown.
74 Broadway World, 27 July 2017.
75 As explained to me by Mendizabal in an interview.
76 Johnson, ‘“Quare” Studies’, p. 13.
77 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p. 1.
78 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 16.
79 ASWSLT, p. 70.