Gender Trouble / Genre Trouble – Cecilie Løveids Østerrike

Abstract Although Cecilie Løveid is one of Norway’s most important contemporary dramatists, she is not generally considered part of mainstream theater. In fact, she has positioned herself against it by her writing of feminist and performative theater texts since her debut in the 1980s. In her play Østerrike, which is inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Brand and by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diary of his stay in Norway, the audience is introduced to a love triangle. Ludwig, his fiancée Agnes and his former boyfriend David are entangeled in a queer love drama causing constant gender trouble. In this article, I will analyze how Løveid combines this gender discourse with a metatextual genre discourse. The play ends with a “beautiful scene”, which disrupts all existing categories of gender and genre. This scene in particular illustrates that Østerrike can be interpreted as a critical commentary on the Ibsen-tradition that determines Løveid’s outsider position.