Jeff Casey is Associate Professor of Theatre at Norwich University in Vermont, where he teaches theatre, literature, media studies, and creative writing and where he is the director of theatre. He holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Primarily, he studies applied theatre and how contemporary theatre and media represent gender, sexuality, Arabs, and displaced peoples. His scholarly articles have appeared in Theatre Topics, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Ecumenica. He is a playwright and director and most recently directed the musical Cabaret, Harold Pinter’s Party Time, Norwich Voices for International Women’s Day, and a staged reading of Issam Mahfouz’s The Dictator. His original plays and performance work have been featured at UW-Madison’s University Theatre Open Stages, the UW Arts Institute’s Inside Story Festival, Mercury Players Theatre, and the Marcia Légère Play Festival. His site-specific performance piece Odd Coupling, a Discourse on Friendship with Occasional Reference to Michel de Montaigne was part of the 2013 Wisconsin Triennial.
Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murph... more Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibi...
In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how th... more In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how the detective genre was being reimagined in the twenty-first century.1 The series, I argued, challenged the normative detective figure in American crime genres and subverted norms of gender, sexuality, and disability implicit therein. The airing of the third season provides the occasion to reexamine the topic. The scene just discussed, and others in the third season, makes some of my arguments from the earlier article seem downright naïve. In that essay, I tried to carefully build a case for the “queer valences” of Lecter and Will’s relationship. These arguments became almost entirely unnecessary with the third season, in which the queer “subtexts” became more explicit. For example, Will confesses of Lecter in one scene from Season 3, “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him” (3:3 "Secondo"). Lecter expresses his affection in less direct ways. He leaves for Will a “broken valentine”, a bloody body mangled to resemble a heart. Will calls it “a valentine written on a broken man” or Lecter’s “broken heart” (3:2 "Primavera"). At the same time, the relationship between the two men remained non-sexual, intensifying the tension in the series, which most interested me originally. The ambiguous nature of the men’s relationship, the tension between homosocial and homoerotic affection, is intensified, not collapsed, in the third season. This fact only increases the value the series offers in interrogating masculinity, sexuality, and homosociality. In this article, I will examine how the third season of Hannibal should serve as a clarion call to reexamine our existing notions of homosocial desire. The series uniquely imagines an intimate, passionate, and ambiguously erotic image of male friendship. The series demands a kind of analysis that many critical approaches, popular and scholarly alike, cannot provide, as so many of these approaches demand a binary framework of friendship-versus-gay- romance. Hannibal, particularly in its third season, asks us to imagine a conceptual space where “erotic” desire and passionate devotion can exist between male friends.
This article examines the “deadly bromance” that unfold between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter i... more This article examines the “deadly bromance” that unfold between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s Hannibal (2013–present). While formerly marked by a rigid ideological commitment to the division between normality and pathology, the detective series increasingly blurs the lines between the pathological criminal other and the normative self. “Deviant detectives” not only blur the line between criminal anti-socialness and normality, but also subvert the normative expectations of gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Hannibal is a representative example of the phenomenon, but, more so, it represents the outer limit of the phenomenon, straining to the braking point the very liminality inherent to the genre. In the series, FBI profiler Will Graham’s loses his entire sense of identity; his selfhood is threatened by the influence of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. This destabilized detective character subverts the boundary between the normative self and the deviant other. As a consequence, the series runs against the grain of the detective genre’s tendency to reinforce normativity, even as it fully realizes the moral and social ambiguity of the detective native to the genre.
Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murph... more Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibi...
In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how th... more In my essay “Queer Cannibals and Deviant Detectives”, I assessed Hannibal as an example of how the detective genre was being reimagined in the twenty-first century.1 The series, I argued, challenged the normative detective figure in American crime genres and subverted norms of gender, sexuality, and disability implicit therein. The airing of the third season provides the occasion to reexamine the topic. The scene just discussed, and others in the third season, makes some of my arguments from the earlier article seem downright naïve. In that essay, I tried to carefully build a case for the “queer valences” of Lecter and Will’s relationship. These arguments became almost entirely unnecessary with the third season, in which the queer “subtexts” became more explicit. For example, Will confesses of Lecter in one scene from Season 3, “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him” (3:3 "Secondo"). Lecter expresses his affection in less direct ways. He leaves for Will a “broken valentine”, a bloody body mangled to resemble a heart. Will calls it “a valentine written on a broken man” or Lecter’s “broken heart” (3:2 "Primavera"). At the same time, the relationship between the two men remained non-sexual, intensifying the tension in the series, which most interested me originally. The ambiguous nature of the men’s relationship, the tension between homosocial and homoerotic affection, is intensified, not collapsed, in the third season. This fact only increases the value the series offers in interrogating masculinity, sexuality, and homosociality. In this article, I will examine how the third season of Hannibal should serve as a clarion call to reexamine our existing notions of homosocial desire. The series uniquely imagines an intimate, passionate, and ambiguously erotic image of male friendship. The series demands a kind of analysis that many critical approaches, popular and scholarly alike, cannot provide, as so many of these approaches demand a binary framework of friendship-versus-gay- romance. Hannibal, particularly in its third season, asks us to imagine a conceptual space where “erotic” desire and passionate devotion can exist between male friends.
This article examines the “deadly bromance” that unfold between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter i... more This article examines the “deadly bromance” that unfold between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in NBC’s Hannibal (2013–present). While formerly marked by a rigid ideological commitment to the division between normality and pathology, the detective series increasingly blurs the lines between the pathological criminal other and the normative self. “Deviant detectives” not only blur the line between criminal anti-socialness and normality, but also subvert the normative expectations of gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Hannibal is a representative example of the phenomenon, but, more so, it represents the outer limit of the phenomenon, straining to the braking point the very liminality inherent to the genre. In the series, FBI profiler Will Graham’s loses his entire sense of identity; his selfhood is threatened by the influence of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. This destabilized detective character subverts the boundary between the normative self and the deviant other. As a consequence, the series runs against the grain of the detective genre’s tendency to reinforce normativity, even as it fully realizes the moral and social ambiguity of the detective native to the genre.
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