The Theatrical in the Sexual, the Sexual in the Theatrical: Some Parallels and Provocations

This essay opens up seom questions and speculations about recent theoretical paradigms of sexuality (from Sociology, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies), and their points of contact with various elements of theatricality. It confirms and extends recent observations in other disciplines about the characteristic theatricality of the specifically sexual aspect of the human imagination and consciousness, and also suggests how theatre, in its differing forms, is a particularly informative analytic manifestation (and manifestation for analysis) of the often contradictory) imaginative impulses associated with the dynamics of eroticism.