Legal Theatre: Staging Critique in the Law School

Abstract

This essay describes the conduct of a year-long course titled ‘Legal Theatre: Exploring Gender and Sexuality Law through a Performative Lens’. The course was premised on two questions: How can the theatrical space help us conduct legal critique differently? Flowing from this, how might we use theatre as a lens to explore different futures for gender and sexuality law? Conducted across two semesters, the first half of the course focused on reading theatrical texts alongside resonant judicial decisions, while simultaneously looking at the mechanics of playwriting. In the second half, students were assigned the task of refining and producing a set of three original scripts, dealing with different questions of gender and sexuality law. I provide a detailed account of this course, in the process unfolding the possibilities of holding law as an interdisciplinary and intersectional practice and of deploying legal critique within a generative, world-making mode.