The House of Hecuba: Tragic/Queer Disidentifications of Colour and the Siege of AIDS

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.